This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the documentary about a German poet whose name took over two minutes to pronounce, and ended ". . .Of Ulm". The interviews with his elderly relatives took so long due the name length, they died waiting for the name to finish.

Medieval German had a word for spaceship? Yeeees....

Why is it that nobody remembers the name of Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittercrasscrenbonfrieddiggerdingledangledongledungle
bursteinvonknackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgrander
knottyspelltinklegrandlichgrumblemeyerspelterwasserkurstlichhimblee
isenbahnwagengutenabendbitteeinnurnburgerbratwustlegernspurtenmitz
weimacheluberhundsfutgumberabershonedankerkalbsfleischmittleraucher von Hautkopft of Ulm?

If you copy the character string from the message that was originally received and use a program like Word to count the number of characters is comes up with more than 600 so I find it unlikely that this, long surname, is real. Although it could just be inaccurately copied by Mr. Haberl.

I remember seeing the entry for this gentleman's full name in the Guiness book in the early 1970s, when I was a child. I think the man also appeared on a Guiness World Records tv show hosted by David Frost sometime back then. I no longer have my 1970s era Guiness book, but I note that the quotation from the webmaster's 1978 edition says that this was the longest name "used" by anyone. That doesn't necessarily mean it was his name at birth. There are some long place names, like that city in Wales with the 100-or-so letter name, but for a surname?

Apparently even Guiness says he didn't use this whole name, except presumably when entering "Longest Name" contests, so I wonder if this really qualifies. It seems to me your name is what everybody calls you and what your mail has written on the envelope and so on. Special names that you hardly ever or never really use shouldn't count.

Since anybody can give him or her self pretty much any name they want, it would be very easy to acquire the world's longest name, especially if there's no requirement that you actually use it every day (just imagine Adoplph Blaine Charles Etc.'s mother calling him to dinner). I could just attach all my ancestor's surnames to mine until I got one long enough, or I could even take this guy's name and add a syllable or two to it. Then I'd have the longest name for a day or so, until somebody added another syllable to my name and used that.

His friends just call him "Pepe".

The "longest name" question is a lot like the "longest word" topic. Kids on the playground used to say (wrongly, it turns out) that the longest word in English is "antidisestablishmentarianism" (which describes an opinion opposed to ending the "establishment," or status as the official religion, of the Church of England). However, since in English, as in most languages, you can make words longer infinitely by adding prefixes, suffixes, and other morphemes (word parts), there is no such thing as a "longest word." How about "antiantidisestablishmentarianism" (the position of those who disagree with antidisestablishmentarians)? But antiantiantidisestablishmentarianism would be an even longer word. Etc., etc.

Gary, you're exactly right about the pointlessness of trying to determine the longest name or longest word.

What I find interesting is Guinness's involvement. Were they the victims of a prank? Why did they ever give this name official status as the world's longest?

On a different subject, when I was ten years old I got to be in the audience on an episode of the British show Record Breakers, hosted by the writers of the Guinness Book of Records, Norris and Ross McWhirter. There was a part of the show where audience members could ask them questions, so I put up my hand and actually got called on by them. My question: "What was the longest eclipse ever." I can no longer remember their reply, but they knew the answer.

Alex said:
"...What I find interesting is Guinness's involvement. Were they the victims of a prank? Why did they ever give this name official status as the world's longest?"

I think a whole lot of the stuff in the Guiness book is of questionable validity and/or not very carefully researched. Remember that the Book of World Records was originally written as a promotion for the pubs owned by the Guiness brewery behemoth, and was (I guess) never intended as a scholarly reference work.

I remember when National Lampoon announced that the IRA had set a world record for assassinating editors of the Guiness Book of Records, after the provisional IRA blew up one of the McWhirter twins (I've forgotten which one). The old record was 0, and the new record was 1.

Tasteless, but indisputably true.

that is indeed, on long name.

You know what, I think he had to shorten his surname to wolfe because how the hell else would you fit a 600 character name on a credit card? hmm?

When I pass his name through Word Count, I get 606 characters. I think some of these may be orthographic mistakes (Bergerdorff should really be Bergedorf, I think) but there's still room for an extra word here or there. I wonder which words have been added? Was the story about the shepherds and interstellar travel really was part of the text of his name, as recorded by the Guinness people? It seems an odd name to bestow upon someone in 1904, but apparently that was the form of the name on his birth certificate and passport.

That Zeus at the end of his name (before igraum) really should come before the "Wolfe..." part - it was his last middle name (one name for every letter of the alphabet).

Collecting names happens to be a particular interest of mine, and I'm surprised I've never come across this one before. I just checked the online catalogue of the University of Toronto, where I'm a student, and it looks like they have most, perhaps all of the old editions of the Guinness Book of Records in the stacks. I should be there later this week, so I'll take a look and report back.

I've been visiting this site for ages but have been pretty quiet (I think I posted once or twice as a guest; I'm not sure what version of my name I used). Hopefully this will finally give me something to contribute.

Well actually the longest word in the english language is 'Smiles'...


...There is a mile between the 2 S's

(Thankyou i'll be here all week!)

Charles said:

"It seems an odd name to bestow upon someone in 1904, but apparently that was the form of the name on his birth certificate and passport."

Am I missing something? Where does it say that this name was on his birth certificate and passport?

...and:
"That Zeus at the end of his name (before igraum) really should come before the "Wolfe..." part - it was his last middle name (one name for every letter of the alphabet)."

This alphabetical thing also makes me suspicious. If Mr. Wolfe... was German, as has been implied, why wouldn't his parents give him one name for each letter of the GERMAN alphabet? German has several characters that are not used in English, such as "ss," "oe," "ae," and "ue," (they don't look like single letters here because I don't have these keys on my American computer, but in German they are individual letters). Some of these seldom or never come at the beginning of a word, but still, if you want to be comprehensive, you should work them in.

Also, some of these names have distinctively English forms: "Charles" rather than Karl, "John" rather than Johannes, and so on.

I agree that the given names he was, er, given seem unusually Anglo-Saxon (with the exception of Adolph, Zeus, and a few others in between). I don't know for a fact that his full name appears as such on his birth certificate or passport, but this site seems to imply that it does. Surely he must have produced some form of ID for the Guinness folks?

I'm highly sceptical as well, and not just becausee of the "Raumschiff" and the strangely unbavarian given names.

First of all, although German is known for having "long words" formed by stringing other words together, there are still rules. You can't just take the spaces out of a sentence and call it a word; and 600 characters is pushing it in any case.

Second, the "story" part of the name is highly babelfishy. Some of the spelling problems are due to imperfect copying, but in other places the most likely explanation is that someone was translating word-for-word by dictionary, with little attention to fancy linguistic stuff like polysemy, agreement or even noun/verb distinctions.

For instance, "vor Altern" is very suspicious, ("ages ago"?); "Menschlichkeit" is the wrong sense of "humanity" ("Menschheit" would make sense in this context); there are case and genus errors all over, some plurals are creatively formed by just adding "-s", and let's not even discuss "Stern welche gehabt bewohnbar Planeten Kreise drehen sich" ... This phrase is not, nor has it ever been, a card-carrying member of the German language.

The "shortened" version consists mostly of suffixes that do appear in names (-stein, -hausen, -berger, -dorff), but they make little sense crowded up like this.

My (completely undocumented) explanation is that this guy had an uncommonly long name by Philadelphian standards, was teased about it, jokingly added further name-like elements, and didn't know when to stop.