How to play the longest word in English possible, in Scrabble, ethylenediaminetetraacetates

Why is ethylenediaminetetraacetates the longest word in Scrabble? There are other longer, more popular words, like floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of esteeming something as worthless, antidisestablishmentarianism, which is wanting to keep the Church of England together, the Mary Poppins originated word of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and that one volcano ash lung disease condition, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Before I answer that, here's how to play ethylenediaminetetraacetates:

• play THY
• turn THY into ETHYL
• skip 1 space and play NE
• skip 2 spaces and play AM
• turn AM into AMIN
• skip 1 space and play TET
• skip 2 spaces and play ACE
• turn ACE into ACETATE
• turn ACETATE into ACETATES 
• turn ETHYL-NE--AMIN-TET--ACETATES into ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATES

It's a hard word to play in Scrabble because none of its obvious compound words of ethylenediamine, diaminetetra, and tetraacetates are words. What is ethylenediaminetetraacetates? It's the conjugate base of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid or EDTA, which is some kind of industrial compound.

The longest word that anyone's actually heard of is electroencephalographically, which is a form of electroencephalograph, an EEG, which is when they put a bunch of wires on your head and the read your brain waves.

How to play electroencephalographically:

• play EL
• turn EL into ELECT
• turn ELECT into ELECTRO
• skip 6 spaces and play AL
• skip 1 space and play GRAPH
• turn ELECTRO------AL-GRAPH into ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPH
• add IC for ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC
• add ALLY for ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHICALLY

However, both of those words don't fit on a regular 15x15 Scrabble board. They're only theoretically possible, because The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary only has 7 and 8 letter words as the longest words, and the official Scrabble dictionary says, "Words that exceed eight letters in length and are not inflected forms of words entered in this dictionary should be looked up in a standard dictionary. The National SCRABBLE® Association recommends Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, as a reference for additional words." And, the longest word in that referenced lexical tome is ethylenediaminetetraacetates. So, that's the answer to the question above. That means you'll either need to play this on Super Scrabble Max Ultimate® which only exists in the future, or find an online word game like Word2 or Lexulous.

So, what's the longest word that you can actually play on a real Scrabble board? Actually, there are thousands. Because of all of the crazy words allowed in the Scrabble dictionary, there's a theoretically possible way to play almost every possible 15-letter word. I did an in-depth analysis where I analyzed each of the possible words based on their letter frequency, and found that interpenetrated or interpenetrates is the easiest word to play, based just on letter frequency.

How to play interpenetrates or interpenetrated:

• play IN
• skip 3 letters and play PEN
• skip 2 letters and play RATE
• turn PEN--RATE into PENETRATE
• turn IN---PENETRATE into INTERPENETRATE
• add a D or an S for the glorious finish

Based on my mathematical analysis of Scrabble letter frequency, the following 15-letter words will be the easiest to play in Scrabble, out of about two thousand possible 15-letter words. Of course getting both wild tiles will help a lot. Because Scrabble has so many allowed crazy 2- and 3-letter words, you should be able to make all of these. For example, MO, LO, and RE are all allowed Scrabble words.

• INTERPENETRATES
• INTERPENETRATED
• ENTREPRENEURIAL
• IRRATIONALITIES
• INTERDEPENDENCE
• NONINTERFERENCE
• OVERREPRESENTED
• INTERFEROMETERS
• INHOMOGENEITIES
• INTERCOLLEGIATE
• NONINTERVENTION
• REPRESENTATIONS
• REPRESENTATIVES

And the hardest 15-letter words to play in Scrabble, based on letter frequency are PSYCHOLOGICALLY and PSYCHOPATHOLOGY.

Links:

• The super long chemical name for titin
• Wikipedia article for EDTA
  
• Wikipedia article on long words
• Really cool blog on long world analysis

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