What is the longest sentence you can come up with?
The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English. It cites a sentence from one of William Faulkner’s novels, Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words. Other sources mention a 4,391 word sentence from James Joyce’s Ulysses. In 2001 Jonathan Coe surpassed both with a 13,955 word sentence in his novel, The Rotters’ Club. It is an open matter if some of these should be admitted. Joyce’s sentence, the last in his famous novel Ulysses could possibly have been much shortened by the addition of a few judicious full stops, with arguably little effect. Here it must be noted that several languages, Greek and Sanskrit for example, have had no punctuation marks, while in English a sentence is anything between a pair of full stops. Notably long sentences abound. Section I of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl is one long sentence. While there may well be a unique longest published sentence of English, and a unique longest English sentence ever used, neith
