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As far as I know, this is the largest real word in English—27 letters long (did I count right?).There are the names of organic chemicals in the jargon of that field that are longer, but these don’t count, since they are hyphenated constructs. There is also a made-up word in the song from the movie Mary Poppins, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Since this word has no meaning, it doesn’t count either, although it illustrates how English can concatenate syllables together to make English-seeming nonsense words.
Indo-European languages tend to do this—link syllables together in long words. English is only a little like that—German and especially Dutch are notorious. Such languages are referred to as agglutinating languages, while languages (such as Vietnamese) who keep things mostly to one syllable are isolating languages. To agglutinate things means to stick things together; to isolate something means to separate things from others. By the way, just what does antidisestablishmentarianism mean? This is a good example of syllable agglutination, illustrating something about how English agglutination works. First, we see the prefix anti-, which is used to mean "against,” or “opposed to.” For example, antiwar protesters are people protesting a war. Warning: there is also a prefix ante-, which means before, such as in the word antebellum, “before the war” (bellum is the Latin word for “war,” and appears in several warlike English words). I mention this here so that you can avoid confusing the two prefixes. So, now we know that our word designates opposition to something. At the end is the suffix –ism, which is used to refer to a movement or philosophy or teaching—note communism, Aristotelianism, and atheism. Hence we can figure that antidisestablishmentarianism is a teaching or belief in opposition to something. Rather than go through a painful and boring analysis of each syllable, let me just say that the word pertains to the matter of established religions. In some countries, there is an established religion, which gets tax support and is the official religion for various public ceremonies. Of course, as secularism has spread around the world, this sort of thing has tended to diminish, and many fundamental laws (constitutions) explicitly prohibit it. In the context of Ireland under British rule in the nineteenth century, Britain had an established church, the Anglican Church (Episcopalian in America), with the Queen (then Queen Victoria) at its head. Ireland, however, was mostly Roman Catholic with a minority (especially in the Ulster counties in the north)of Calvinist Protestants (Presbyterians in America). So, naturally, there was agitation to remove the Anglican Church’s status as the established church, at least in Ireland. Those who favored this were disestablishmentarianists, and those who opposed disestablishment of the Anglican Church were antidisestablishmentarianists. This is obviously not a word one really needs in one’s vocabulary, since the issues involved became moot long ago, but it is a good word to know regardless, as the prime example of English agglutination. There is another word that I can’t keep from mentioning in this context—the verb to defenestrate with the corresponding noun defenestration. It is not likely you will ever find this word used seriously except in the specific phrase The Defenestration of Prague. Anyway, to defenestrate means, “to throw out of a window.” It is an agglutination of the prefix–de, meaning “out” and the French word fenestre, meaning “window.” If someone has been defenestrated, they were thrown bodily out of a window, which is exactly what happened to some people during a ruckus in Prague in 1419 during the Reformation. A radical mob threw some officials out a window (apparently a high window since they were killed). Now there is a good word to know—ruckus.
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