What is the longest word in Shakespeare's works?

The longest word in Shakespeare’s works is honorificabilitudinitatibus.

The 27-letter word appears in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, Scene 1, where the clown Costard uses it while mocking the elaborate language of the pedantic characters Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel. In context, the word is part of Shakespeare’s comedy about pretension, learning, and overly ornate speech.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is not an English coinage by Shakespeare. It is the dative and ablative plural of a medieval Latin noun meaning roughly “the state of being able to achieve honours.” Forms of the word existed in medieval European scholarship centuries before Shakespeare used it, including in Latin dictionaries and writings associated with Dante.

Readers sometimes confuse it with famous long English words such as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis or antidisestablishmentarianism. Those words are longer or more familiar in other contexts, but they do not appear in Shakespeare’s surviving works. The Shakespearean word is also notable for strictly alternating consonants and vowels, making it a linguistic curiosity beyond its literary record.