The call was to come to a studio in L.A. and record a song â a song so epic, so star-studded, so unabashedly schmaltzy it will never be forgotten. That song, We Are the World, went on to sell more than 20 million copies and raise over $63 million for humanitarian aid in Africa.
The longest word in the Oxford Dictionary of English is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - at 45 letters. Its definition is an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease casued by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.
So what if we want a word that is not famous for being long, but a word that describes something real. What's the longest one of those? Science writer Sam Kean, in his book The Disappearing Spoon, worked really hard on this and after much sleuthing, he landed on a word that comes not from dancing English nannies but from virus-hunting scientists.