Longest English sentence

The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English. It cites a sentence from one of William Faulkner's novels, Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words. Other sources mention a 4,391 word sentence from James Joyce's Ulysses. In 2001 Jonathan Coe surpassed both with a 13,955 word sentence in his novel, The Rotters' Club.

It is an open matter if some of these should be admitted. Joyce's sentence, the last in his famous novel Ulysses could possibly have been much shortened by the addition of a few judicious full stops, with arguably little effect. Here it must be noted that several languages, Greek and Sanskrit for example, have had no punctuation marks, while in English a sentence is anything between a pair of full stops.

Notably long sentences abound. Section I of Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl is one long sentence.

While there may well be a unique longest published sentence of English, and a unique longest English sentence ever used, neither of these records can ever be considered permanent. There will never be a "longest possible sentence of English," as there is no upper bound on the length of English sentences.

English grammar contains recursive rules. (It is an open question whether the grammar of a natural language like English can be fully described solely by recursive rules.) A recursive rule is one which applies to objects of a given sort and produces further objects of that same sort. Thus, the results of applying a recursive rule can have that same recursive rule applied to them. This process can be repeated as often as desired.

Among the recursive rules of English are the following:

• If P and Q are sentences, so is "P and Q"
• If P is a sentence and N is a name, "N said ' P ' " is a sentence.

So, if X is the sentence that the Guinness Book cites as the longest English sentence, here is one that is longer:

According to the Guinness Book ' X ' is the longest sentence of English.

Here is one that is still longer:

On this page appears the sentence "According to the Guinness Book ' X ' is the longest sentence of English."

And another:

On this page appears the sentence "According to the Guinness Book ' X ' is the longest sentence of English" and that sentence is not the longest sentence on this page.

Obviously, this process can be repeated ad infinitum.

There is also a joke that goes "The shortest sentence is 'I Am.' The longest is 'I Do.'"

See also: generative grammar, indefinite extendibility

External links and references

• One really long English sentence
• More info on long sentences