Your grammar teacher probably taught you to use periods to end sentences.

Some authors apparently missed that day of class.

Literary history is full of authors who have stretched a single sentence far beyond anything your high school English teacher would have tolerated. James Joyce famously produced one that ran 4,391 words. Then British novelist Jonathan Coe looked at that achievement and, intentionally or otherwise, responded with the literary equivalent of “That’s cute.”

In his 2001 novel The Rotters’ Club, Coe unleashed a sentence containing 13,955 words—more than three times the length of Joyce’s celebrated effort. For years, it was widely cited as the longest sentence in English literature. Then other writers began producing entire novels consisting essentially of one sentence, because apparently the punctuation arms race had not yet reached its natural conclusion.

So what actually is the longest sentence in English literature? The answer depends on what counts as a sentence, what counts as a novel, and just how much grammatical mischief we are willing to tolerate.

James Joyce Sets the Bar at 4,391 Words

When James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, he gave generations of English majors many things to contemplate, including symbolism, stream of consciousness, the nature of modernity, and whether changing majors to accounting might still be an option.

The novel concludes with Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, a sprawling stream of thoughts with remarkably little interest in stopping for conventional punctuation. One of its sentences runs for 4,391 words. You can read a somewhat censored, slightly abridged version of that sentence here.

For a long time, that monster was routinely described as the longest sentence in English literature. At 4,391 words, it is roughly the length of a respectable magazine article, except Joyce decided to remove the convenience of periodically allowing the reader to encounter a full stop.

Apparently, punctuation was for people who lacked commitment.

Then Jonathan Coe Wrote a 13,955-Word Sentence

Joyce’s achievement looked fairly secure until British novelist Jonathan Coe published The Rotters’ Club in 2001.

The novel ends with a section called “Green Coaster,” a tour de force consisting of a single 13,955-word sentence. In the American edition, it begins on page 377 and sprawls across 33 pages.

To put that into perspective, Coe’s sentence is more than three times as long as Joyce’s 4,391-word effort. It is also longer than many short stories, term papers, legal briefs, and conversations with people who said, “I’ll just tell you the short version.”

For years, The Rotters’ Club was widely credited with containing the longest sentence in English literature. That is the fact originally we reported in “Take a Deep Breath and Read This Sentence…” when it was published in 2015.

Then literature continued happening.

Coe Got the Idea From a Novel That Is One Giant Sentence

Coe did not arrive at this grammatical act of vandalism entirely on his own. His inspiration came from Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal and his 1964 novella Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age.

Hrabal’s book tells the rambling story of an elderly man recounting his adventures, loves, humiliations, memories, opinions, and assorted mental detours. More importantly for our purposes, the entire story unfolds as one continuous sentence.

A current Vintage Classics edition runs 96 pages.

That makes the usual advice to “finish the sentence you’re on and then turn out the light” potentially disastrous.

We previously looked at Hrabal’s remarkable book in this article about Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. Coe admired Hrabal’s technique and decided, in effect, that what the English language really needed was more of whatever was happening there.

So Is 13,955 Words Still the Longest Sentence?

This is where a wonderfully simple trivia question becomes irritatingly complicated.

If we are talking about historically famous long sentences embedded within otherwise conventionally punctuated English novels, Coe’s 13,955-word marathon remains an important benchmark. Calling it the unquestioned longest sentence ever written, however, no longer works.

In 2016, Irish novelist Mike McCormack published Solar Bones, a novel narrated in a single sentence. Depending on the edition, that sentence continues for well over 200 pages. The book subsequently won the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, proving that refusing to use periods can be either a serious literary technique or the most successful punctuation-related act of rebellion since someone first decided the semicolon looked suspicious.

Then came Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport. It runs roughly 1,000 pages and is constructed essentially as one enormous sentence. Ellmann herself has defended describing it as one sentence rather than several, so anyone hoping to settle the matter by casually counting periods should pack provisions.

At that point, asking for “the longest sentence in English literature” requires some ground rules. Are entire novels eligible? Does unusual punctuation count as ending a sentence? Are we measuring words, characters, or pages? Does a deliberately experimental book compete in the same category as a single gigantic sentence tucked inside an otherwise conventional novel?

Once those questions arrive, the Guinness-style simplicity of the record begins quietly backing toward the exit.

Why Would Anyone Write a Sentence This Long?

Contrary to appearances, these writers were not simply being paid by the comma.

Extremely long sentences can reproduce the way thoughts actually move: one idea triggers another, which produces a memory, which inspires an observation, which wanders into something apparently unrelated before somehow circling back fifteen minutes later. Stream-of-consciousness writers such as Joyce used that effect deliberately, allowing grammar to follow thought rather than forcing thought into tidy little grammatical boxes.

Hrabal uses the unbroken sentence to create the sensation of an elderly raconteur who simply keeps talking. McCormack uses the form to sustain the flow of memory and reflection through Solar Bones. Ellmann uses repetition and accumulation to recreate the relentless mental activity of her narrator.

In other words, the long sentence can be more than a stunt. In capable hands, it creates momentum, intimacy, confusion, urgency, claustrophobia, or the unsettling feeling that the author has hidden all the periods and will not tell you where they are.

It can also be the technique used by telemarketers who are determined not to pause long enough for you to say that you’re not interested.

Could You Actually Read One of These Sentences in a Single Breath?

No.

That answer required considerably fewer words.

Speech researchers have found that breathing during normal speech often coordinates with grammatical and syntactic boundaries. Studies of read speech show that inhalations overwhelmingly occur at syntactic breaks, and some research has found that longer utterances are preceded by deeper breaths, although that relationship is not universal. A 2017 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology summarizes the research on the surprisingly complicated relationship between breathing and speech planning.

So a 13,955-word written sentence is not intended to be spoken on one lungful of air. Written grammar and human respiratory plumbing have wisely entered into separate contractual arrangements.

Long Sentences Are Apparently Contagious

Literature is hardly the only place where sentences get out of hand. John Adams managed to squeeze a 727-word sentence into his inaugural address, complete with 60 commas and 17 semicolons. That is an impressive achievement for a politician, a profession not otherwise famous for having difficulty continuing to speak.

And if exceptionally long units of language appeal to you, you can continue this descent into lexical excess with our collection of some of the longest words in the English language. Eventually, perhaps, someone will put the longest word inside the longest sentence and cause the world’s largest mass resignation of copy editors.

So What Is the Longest Sentence in English Literature?

The irritating answer is that there probably isn’t a single, universally agreed-upon winner. Jonathan Coe’s 13,955-word sentence in The Rotters’ Club unquestionably demolished the famous 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses, but later writers complicated matters by deciding that one sentence really ought to be enough for an entire book.

At that point, the competition stops being about sentence length and starts becoming a question of philosophy. Does a 1,000-page novel count as one sentence merely because the author stubbornly refuses to provide a full stop? How much punctuation can you sneak in before the sentence is technically dead? And at what point does a copy editor simply close the manuscript, turn off the computer, and go raise alpacas?

So Coe may no longer be able to claim an undisputed world record, but 13,955 words remains an astonishing achievement. Most of us begin to worry that a sentence is getting out of hand somewhere around the third comma. Coe kept going for 33 pages.

Your grammar teacher would probably have had some comments in the margin.

Assuming there was enough margin.

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