I have been getting tired of all us Bulgarians talking about непротивоконституционствувателствувайте ‘do not act against the constitution’, addressed to more than one person — our longest word — and referencing it every now and then. Other words deserve love too. I sought for more words in the Bulgarian vocabulary that shine in not so obvious ways. I took Miglen Iliev’s full word corpus in Cyrillic, cleaned it for all entries that contained letters beyond the Bulgarian alphabet, and looked for some arbitrary features that I personally found interesting. Then, I hand-picked the remarkable words in those categories as some form of quality assurance.

I do not claim to be accurate. The corpus contains a lot of noise from other Slavic languages or random interjections. Bulgarian by itself tends to be a highly inflected language that allows for various combinations. I also found myself to be quite arbitrary in the hand-picking processing. Therefore, from now on, instead of 'the longest words', I will simply use 'long words' and similar lexical acrobatics.

Long words

1. непротивоконституционствувателствувайте (39; ‘do not act against the constitution’, imperative mood, addressed to the second plural)
2. циклопентанперхидрофенантреновото (33; ‘pertaining to cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene’, neuter singular, definite article)
3. хексакосиоихексеконтахексафобията (33; ‘the phobia of the number 666’, feminine singular, definite article)
4. хексакосиоихексеконтахексафобите (32; ‘those having a phobia of the number 666’, plural, definite article)
5. хексакосиоихексеконтахексафобия (31; ‘the phobia of the number 666’, feminine singular, indefinite article)
6. непротивоезикоругателствувайте (30; ‘do not speak ill of the language’, imperative mood, addressed to the second singular)

Words containing long alphabetic substrings

All contain the same five-letter alphabetic substring мнопр, and are given in base forms.

• взаимнопрост (‘coprime’)
• взаимноприемлив (‘mutually acceptable’)
• срамноправочревен (‘pertaining to the puborectalis’)

Words containing long inverse-alphabetic substrings

All contain four-letter substrings in reverse alphabetic order, and are given in base forms.

• изженя (‘to marry off’, implies action by or onto all people of a given collection)
• тарпон (‘tarpon’)
• футсал (‘futsal’)
• изжегля (‘to harness to a yoke’, implies action onto all animals of a given collection)
• маскарпоне (‘mascarpone’)

Long palindromes

All are nouns, contain nine letters, and are masculine singular.

• непотопен (‘unsunk’)
• ненаранен (‘unharmed’)
• незаразен (‘non-contagious’)
• незапазен (‘unpreserved’)
• недоходен (‘unprofitable’)

Long words that can be typed in a single keyboard row

This assumes the keyboard layout specified in БДС 5237:1978, as this is the standard Bulgarian layout for typing in Cyrillic. I have a firm conviction about this. Please do not ask me to compile those statistics for any QWERTY derivative. You could consult its page on the Bulgarian Wikipedia, which I am quite fond of. As I was typing these words by hand, I inadvertently confirmed that they each require just one keyboard-layout row. It felt almost therapeutical.

Top row:

1. екзекуции (9; ‘executions’)
2. кизикски (8; ‘pertaining to Kyzikos’, masculine singular)
3. дедукции (8; ‘deductions’)
4. дисекции (8; ‘dissections’)
5. дискусии (8; ‘discussions’)
6. ексцесии (8; ‘excesses’)
7. уесекски (8; ‘pertaining to Wessex’, masculine singular)

Middle row:

All contain 13 letters.

• намножаваната (archaic of ‘the multiplied’, feminine singular)
• намножаваното (archaic of ‘the multiplied’, neuter singular)
• многоатомната (‘pertaining to many atoms’, feminine singular)
• многоатомното (‘pertaining to many atoms’, neuter singular)

Bottom row:

All contain four letters.

• плъх (‘rat’, indefinite article)
• плюй (‘Spit!’, imperative mood, addressed to the second singular)

Long word with ь

Thе letter ь is used in rare occasions and usually serves to soften other phonemes. It is somewhat neglected, and this is my small gesture towards it.

• бронетранспортьорите (20; ‘the armoured trucks’)