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You may have heard that the longest word in the world is antidisestablishmentarianism. This 28-letter word, which is the name of a movement in 19th century England against the disestablishment of the Church of England, sure is a mouthful. Gleeful middle schoolers love to say it because once you know this word, you must truly have mastered the language.

There’s just one problem: it’s not the longest word. No one is quite sure where it started, but the idea of antidisestablishmentarianism being the longest word is a linguistic myth. So what is the longest word?

Well, that question causes some trouble. The fact is that many languages are agglutinative. That means words can be created by just jamming other, smaller words together. A famous example of this is German, which has a reputation for having words for everything. The official longest German word at 63 letters used to be the name of a beef label law: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The law went away in 2013, however, and this word was struck from the books.

Because German words can be made by mashing smaller words together, they can technically stretch to infinity. And German isn’t alone in this (nor is it even the most impressive); languages including Finnish, Estonian and English can all produce words that are infinitely long. Therefore, the longest word is infinitely long. Case closed.

Still here? OK, fine, that’s kind of cheating. There must be impressively long words that actually exist. Here are a few contenders.