Longest Sentence / history | New Literature vol.1(7)

Longest sentence in English literature/language belongs to writer Nigel Tomm. The sentence contains 2,403,109 words, 15,403,732 characters (with spaces) or 3,248 pages, and it is published in four volumes of Nigel Tomm’s novel ‘The Blah Story’ (i.e., volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19). The sentence ends up with a 3,609,750-letter word which contains all previously known longest words (read more..).

The second longest sentence belongs to Nigel Tomm too. The Blah Story, Volume 4 consists of one ultra long sentence which contains 469,375 words or 2,273,551 characters (with spaces).

What was before Nigel Tomm? “Traditionally, the longest sentence in English literature has been found in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ which contains 4,391 words. However this was surpassed in 2001 by Jonathan Coe’s book ‘The Rotter’s Club’ which contains a sentence 13,955 words long. There is also a Polish novel ‘Gates of Paradise’ written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, and published in 1960, with about 40,000 word sentence. Finally, there is a Czech novel that consists of one long sentence (128 pages long) ‘Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age’ by Bohumil Hrabal.”

All the books you can find here.

---