question: Why are names of molecules and such in chemistry so long and convoluted?
comment: If you are familiar with your IUPAC naming conventions then the big long name actually tells you exactly how to draw [the molecule]( URL_0 ). There are two(di) methyl groups (CH3) off to the left, thus Dimethyl. There's a 5 carbon long string(pentyl) with 4(tetra) OH(hydroxy) groups coming off the side, thus tetrahydroxypentyl. The names seem long and complicated because they're not just names, they're instructions. If you're a German Chemist and you've never heard it called Riboflavin before you wouldn't know what Riboflavin was, but you could use the long name to match it up to the common name you know that molecule as.
passages: Systematic names of chemical compounds can run to hundreds of thousands of characters in length. The rules of creation of such names are commonly defined by international bodies, therefore they formally belong to many languages. The longest recognized systematic name is for the protein titin, at 189,819 letters. While lexicographers regard generic names of chemical compounds as "verbal formulae" rather than words, for its sheer length the systematic name for titin is often included in longest-word lists.
   extendable compound words can be found in the language of chemical compounds, where, in the cases of biochemistry and polymers, they can be practically unlimited in length, mostly because the German rule suggests combining all noun adjuncts with the noun as the very last stem. German examples include (color television set), (radio remote control), and the often quoted jocular word (originally only two Fs, Danube-Steamboat-Shipping Company captain['s] hat), which can of course be made even longer and even more absurd, e.g. "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenreinigungsausschreibungsverordnungsdiskussionsanfang" ("beginning of the discussion of a regulation on tendering of Danube steamboat shipping company captain hats") etc. According to several editions of the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest published German word has 79 letters and is " Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft "("Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Electric[ity] Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam Shipping"), but there is no evidence that this association ever actually existed.
   BULLET::::- Steric hindrance: organic precursors are often bulky, and can cover several surface groups when attached to the surface.
  
  BULLET::::- Long pulsing times: organic precursors can have very low vapour pressures, and very long pulsing times may be necessary in order to achieve saturation. In addition, long purging times are usually needed to remove all unreacted molecules from the chamber afterwards.
  
  BULLET::::- Low temperatures: to increase the precursor vapour pressure, one might think of increasing its temperature. Nevertheless, organic precursors are usually very thermally fragile, and a temperature increase may induce decomposition.
   The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name "Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine" for the protein also known as titin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. In nature, DNA molecules can be much bigger than protein molecules and therefore potentially be referred to with much longer chemical names. For example, the wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs, so the sequence of one of its strands, if written out in full like "Adenilyladenilylguanilylcystidylthymidyl...", would be about 8 billion letters long. The longest published word, "Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso...serine", referring to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus (), is 1,185 letters long, and appeared in the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, the Chemical Abstracts Service overhauled its naming system and started discouraging excessively long names. In 2011, a dictionary broke this record with a 1909-letter word describing the "trpA" protein ().
   In proper nouns, many Korean monarchs have long posthumous names built from many different Sino-Korean nouns describing their positive characteristics, for example Sunjo of Joseon, whose full posthumous name is the 77-syllable-block ().
  
  Section::::Lithuanian.
  
  The longest Lithuanian word is 40 letters long:
   Four-carbon molecule
  
  Four-carbon molecules are based on a skeleton made from four carbon atoms. They may be in a chain, branched chains, cycles or even bicyclic compounds
  
  Hydrocarbons that include four atoms are:
  
  BULLET::::- butane CH
  
  BULLET::::- isobutane CH
  
  BULLET::::- but-1-ene CH
  
  BULLET::::- but-2-ene CH
  
  BULLET::::- but-1-yne CH
  
  BULLET::::- but-2-yne CH
  
  BULLET::::- isobutylene CH
  
  BULLET::::- butadiene CH
  
  BULLET::::- 1,2-butadiene CH
  
  BULLET::::- vinylacetylene CH
  
  BULLET::::- diacetylene CH
  
  BULLET::::- butatriene CH
  
  BULLET::::- cyclobutane CH
  
  BULLET::::- cyclobutene CH
  
  BULLET::::- cyclobutyne CH
  
  BULLET::::- cyclobutadiene CH
  
  BULLET::::- methylenecyclopropene CH
  
  BULLET::::- bicyclobutane CH
  
  BULLET::::- 1-bicyclobutene CH
  
  BULLET::::- Δ-bicyclobutene CH
  
  BULLET::::- propalene CH
  
  BULLET::::- methylcyclopropane CH
   Danish, like many Germanic languages, is capable of compounding words to create "ad hoc" compounds of potentially limitless length. Nevertheless, the word " – which means "a period of stabilising the planning of a specialist doctor's practice" – was cited in 1993 by the Danish version of the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest word in the Danish language at 51 letters long. Some might have heard about the word "", which is 54 letters long, created by Hans Christian Andersen. This word, however, was made up by H.C. Andersen and has never been accepted into a major dictionary.
   In this example, the carbon atoms are numbered from one to five, which starts at one end and proceeds sequentially along the chain. Now the position of the oxygen atom can be defined as on carbon atom number two, three or four. However, atoms two and four are exactly equivalent - which can be shown by turning the molecule around by 180 degrees.
   In Vietnamese, which has an abundance of compound words, initialisms are very commonly used for both proper and common nouns. Examples include "TP.HCM" (', Ho Chi Minh City), "THPT" (', high school), "CLB" (', club), "CSDL" (', database), "NXB" (', publisher), "ÔBACE" (', a general form of address), and "CTTĐVN" (', Vietnamese Martyrs). Longer examples include "CHXHCNVN" (', Socialist Republic of Vietnam) and "MTDTGPMNVN" ("", Viet Cong). Long initialisms have become widespread in legal contexts in Vietnam, for example . It is also common for a writer to coin an ad-hoc initialism for repeated use in an article.
   In his comedy "Assemblywomen" (c. 392 BC), Aristophanes coined the 173-letter word , a fictional food dish consisting of a combination of fish and other meat. The word is cited as the longest ancient Greek word ever written.
  
  A modern Greek word of 22 letters is () (gen. (), 25 letters) meaning "electroencephalogram".
  
  Section::::Hungarian.
   Turkish, as an agglutinative language, carries the potential for words of arbitrary length.
  
  ", at 70 letters, has been cited as the longest Turkish word. It was used in a contrived story designed to use this word. The word means "As if you would be from those we can not easily/quickly make a maker of unsuccessful ones" and its usage was illustrated as follows: 
  
  " ' ' ' ' ' "' "
   Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also.
  
  The longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. In German, extremely 
   Section::::Storage and management.
  
  The "chemical space" of all possible organic chemicals is large and increases exponentially with the size of the molecule. Most chemical libraries do not typically have a fully represented chemical space mostly because of storage and cost concerns.
   In Japanese, clipped compounds are very commonly used to shorten long, either coined or wholly borrowed, compounds (see also Japanese phonology and Transcription into Japanese). For instance, a word processor (ワードプロセッサ wādo purosessa") may be referred to as simply ワープロ "wāpuro", sexual harassment (セクシャルハラスメント sekusharu harasumento") be セクハラ "sekuhara", the program Clip Studio Paint (クリップスタジオペイント Kurippu Sutajio Peinto") be クリスタ "Kurisuta", the video game series "Monster Hunter" (モンスターハンター Monsutā Hantā") be モンハン "Monhan", the United Nations (国際連合 Kokusai Rengō") be 国連 "Kokuren", the Soviet Union (ソビエト連邦 Sobieto Renpō") be ソ連 "Soren".
   In Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Even those with less than three components can look mysterious to non-Finnish speakers, such as (emergency exit). Internet folklore sometimes suggests that (Airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student) is the longest word in Finnish, but evidence of it actually being used is scant and anecdotal at best.
   Some are given intentionally unusual trivial names based on their structure, a notable property or at the whim of those who first isolate them. However, many trivial names predate formal naming conventions. Trivial names can also be ambiguous or carry different meanings in different industries, geographic regions and languages.
   A separate group of compounds with subordinated elements is the one named literally “meaning-condensing” or “meaning-compressing” compounds, which have a more complex internal structure, containing implicit elements outside the constituting words, or sometimes where the present meaning cannot be derived at all from the elements. They are always written in one word, e.g. "csigalépcső" ’spiral staircase,’ lit. “snail-staircase”, i.e. a staircase similar to the shell of snails.
   Traditionally, the word " ("of the least cultivable", 31 letters) is considered as the longest Slovak word, but there are some longer artificial words. Most of them are compound adjectives in dative, instrumental or other grammatical case and derived from the iterative or frequentative verbal form or the ability adjective form (like -able).
  
  Artificial words, lexically valid but never used in language:
  
  BULLET::::- ", 33 letters
  
  BULLET::::- ", 44 letters, "through the least crystallised ones"
  
  BULLET::::- ", 39 letters
  
  Section::::Spanish.
   Length of words, like everything else in Ptydepe, is determined scientifically. The vocabulary of Ptydepe uses entropy encoding: shorter words have more common meanings. Therefore, the shortest word in Ptydepe, "gh", corresponds to what is so far known to be the most general term in natural language, "whatever". (The longest word in Ptydepe, which contains 319 letters, is the word for "wombat" in an English translation. However in the Czech original it is a name for a nonexistent member of the genus Apus, rorýs říční.) Theoretically an even shorter word than "gh" exists in Ptydepe, namely "f", but it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than "whatever" is discovered.
   In scientific documents, international treaties, patents and legal definitions, names for chemicals are needed that
   More recently (Bisson and Hussain) have proposed a new approach of using the similarity between words and the similarity between documents to co-cluster the matrix. Their method (known as χ-Sim, for cross similarity) is based on finding document-document similarity and word-word similarity, and then using classical clustering methods such as hierarchical clustering. Instead of explicitly clustering rows and columns alternately, they consider higher-order occurrences of words, inherently taking into account the documents in which they occur. Thus, the similarity between two words is calculated based on the documents in which they occur and also the documents in which "similar" words occur. The idea here is that two documents about the same topic do not necessarily use the same set of words to describe it but a subset of the words and other similar words that are characteristic of that topic. This approach of taking higher-order similarities takes the latent semantic structure of the whole corpus into consideration with the result of generating a better clustering of the documents and words.
   The corresponding Chinese names are "qīngqì" (light gas), "yǎngqì" (nourishing gas), and "dànqì" (diluting gas). A scheme for translating chemical names into Chinese was developed by John Fryer and Xu Shou in 1871. Where traditional names were well established, they kept them; otherwise, a single character for a name was compounded out of one of the five "xing" (phases) – metal, wood, water, fire, and earth – and a sound from the English name of the element.
  
  Section::::Inorganic chemistry.
   Section::::Law of composition.:Polymers in condensed formulas.
  
  For polymers in condensed chemical formulas, parentheses are placed around the repeating unit. For example, a hydrocarbon molecule that is described as CH(CH)CH, is a molecule with fifty repeating units. If the number of repeating units is unknown or variable, the letter "n" may be used to indicate this formula: CH(CH)CH.
  
  Section::::Law of composition.:Ions in condensed formulas.
   Very long Polish words can be created as adjectives from numerals and nouns. For example, ", 54 letters, is the genitive singular form of an adjective meaning roughly "of nine-hundred and ninety-nine nationalities". Similar words are rather artificial compounds, constructed within allowed grammar rules, but are seldom used in spoken language, although they are not nonsense words. It is possible to make even longer words in this way, for example:
  
  " (176 letters, meaning "of 999,999,999,999 years old").
   The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis", a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis. The word was deliberately coined to be the longest word in English, and has since been used in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.
  
  The "Oxford English Dictionary" contains "pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism" (30 letters).
  