Old English replacement of the letter ƿynn with w. This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. For ease of reading, the passage has been divided into sentences while the pilcrows represent the original division. The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first these were often marginal or interlinear glosses, but soon came to be gathered into word-lists such
Longest word in English likely to be encountered in general text are "deinstitutionalization" and "counterrevolutionaries", with 22 letters each. A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is "uncharacteristically", at 20 letters. The word "internationalization" is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last. In his play "Assemblywomen" ("Ecclesiazousae"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients: Henry Carey's farce