User:Rincewind42/longest

Chinese
In terms of pronunciation, Chinese characters (Mandarin) are strictly monosyllabic. As such, a majority of words are limited to a length of three phonemes, but in the Beijing area, a fourth phoneme, usually "r", can be added (see Erhua). In Romanized spelling, no more than six letters are needed for any single Chinese character in standard pronunciation, such as the likes of 双, which is spelled "shuang" in pinyin.

Individual characters are not direct equivalents of words in the English sense, as many Chinese "words" require more than one character to express, one being 葡萄 (putao), or "grapes" in English.

Chinese is not written in a line, so each character has the same physical size when written. However, characters are made up of strokes of varying numbers. The length of the word could thus be thought of as the number of strokes required to write the word. Using this method we get several contenders for the longest word. The most complex written Chinese characters are (52 strokes): A kind of noodles for Shaanxi province known as,  (48 strokes),  (44 strokes),  (39 strokes),  (36 strokes),  (36 strokes),  ya (35 strokes).