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News & Views
2021–2 Season
Week 6.1

On this page:

Cup Round 2: Results
Cup Quarter–Finals: Draw
Notable Results
The Tie–Break!

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News and Views: 2021–21 Season – 25 January 2022

Cup Round 2: Results

Poachers 109 99 Waters Green Weavers
Queens 102 102 Dolphin
Queens won on the tie–break
Nags Head 88 76 Sutton Mutton
Dolphin Dragons 97 91 Queen Bs
Sutton Club 95 88 Harrington Diamonds
Park Taverners 91 84 Park Timers
Harrington Academicals 83 109 Nags Head 'B'
Plough Horntails 94 77 Waters Green Lemmings

Cup Quarter–Finals: Draw

Park Taverners Poachers
Queens Nags Head 'B'
Nags Head Dolphin Dragons
Plough Horntails Sutton Club

Notable Results

The outstanding result this week has to be the Sutton Club's victory over Harrington Diamonds – C League beating A League. Congratulations to the Sutton team – anyone care to give us a report on the Forum?

Another upset, going by League status at least, was the Queen Bs losing to the Dolphin Dragons. This was always a tough draw for the former British Flag though – we all know that the Dragons are a formidable team in the knockout format.

The Tie–Break!

But I hope no eyebrows will be raised if I mention the drawn game at the Queens. The tie–break question (probably never to be forgotten by anyone who took part in this round) was:

"The longest word in English, formulated in America, has 189,819 letters, but how long in minutes would it take to pronounce it?"

The Dolphin made an 'educated' guess and came up with 17 minutes. The Queens tried to work it out, based on an estimate of five letters per syllable and six syllables spoken per second. They then divided 38,000 by 360, and this resulted in two different figures: just over 10 minutes, and just over 100. After some debate, during which the Dolphin team and the question master (Bill Moores from the Chester Road Tavern) waited with generous forbearance, they agreed to plump for 105 minutes.

The 'correct' answer being 210 minutes, the Queens were out by a factor of exactly 2. It was probably no consolation to the Dolphin that the home team were a lot closer than them this time – unlike the last time a similar situation occured (at the semi–final stage in 2016–17) when both teams were miles out, but the Ox–fford 'C' (as they then were) were just marginally fewer miles out.

Letters and Syllables

Clearly the Queens' guesstimates were in the right ball–park, but still some way out. So what were the correct figures? How many letters are there in a syllable, and how many syllables can you say in a minute?

Consideration of words like antidisestablishmentarianism, flauccinaucinihilipilification, and let's not forget supercali–fragilisticexpialidocious, give results of 28 letters and 11 syllables (average 2.5 letters per syllable), 30 letters and 12 syllables (also 2.5) and 34 letters, 14 or 15 syllables (2.3) – remarkably close really. (Is 'docious' two syllables, or three?) So the Queens' guesstimate of 5 letters per syllable was out by a factor of about 2 – the same as their final answer to the question – which suggests that the other guesstimate, of six syllables spoken per second, was just about spot on.

I know you're wondering how many letters, and how many syllables, are in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll–llantysiliogogogoch. Well, sources seem to agree that it's 58 letters; Wikipedia says 18 syllables, which is one fewer than the way my mother taught me to say it (I make it 19). This gives an average of either 3.05 or 3.22 letters per syllable – either way, significantly more than the three English words cited above (one of which is not really English). Which may go to show that there is some truth in what they say about the Welsh language!

It may not have been to everyone's taste, but this tie–break question was at least different.

So What Is the Word?

Naturally, after the match, I turned to Google to find out what the word was – and indeed, who worked out how many minutes it took to pronounce it.

The simplest answer, as so often, was on Wikipedia, which lists eight words that (I would suggest) can only be thought of as examples. The longest of them all, by a huge margin, is "The chemical composition of titin, the largest known protein". It has 189,819 letters and is the "longest known word overall by magnitudes. Attempts to say the entire word have taken two to three and a half hours ... whether this is a word is disputed".

Titin is also known as connectin; 'titin' itself is short for 'Titan protein'. Wikipedia abbreviates the word in question – the longest English word, which denotes titin's chemical composition – to "Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanyl ... isoleucine". It gives the complete word in an Appendix, where it lists 21 chemicals that make up the protein. All but one of their names appear hundreds of times in the word, some of them over 2,000 times. The one exception is 'isoleucine', which appears only once as the final component (see abbreviation quoted earlier in this paragraph).

And How Do They Know How Long It Takes to Say It?

The mathematically–inclined reader will have spotted that 210 minutes is exactly three and a half hours.

The web page that Wikipedia cites for the "three and a half hour" version is no longer available – not in my country or region, at least. But Google did find me a website, named Geekologie, which promises a YouTube video of someone actually doing it. Sadly the video is no longer available, but Geekologie does say that it takes 3 hours and 33 minutes, or 213 minutes.

However ... the YouTube video that Wikipedia cites to support its "two hour" assertion is still live. In it, someone does actually read the word out loud; and I can reveal that according to the YouTube timer, it takes 113 minutes and 51 seconds. (I obviously didn't watch the whole thing; I watched the beginning and skipped to the end.)

The crucial words in Wikipedia's entry, you might think, are "Attempts to say the entire word have taken two to three and a half hours". Such a wide variation! The video that I found takes just under two hours, but Google did find me plenty of websites that say it takes three and a half.

If you watch the two–hour video, or any part of it, you may feel that MrBeast (I think that's his "handle") has no idea what he's reading, and completely mispronounces the majority of the word's elements. You may wonder how long it would take someone who did understand what they were reading; but I reckon anyone that fits that description would probably have better things to do with their time.

The point is that there is no definitive answer to this tie–break question. Even 210 minutes is an approximation – for 213, if Geekologie is to be believed; and I myself have seen it done in less than 114 minutes.

The Moral?

There is a wider point, which could be applied to several tie–break questions that we've had over the years. Tie–break questions should surely be something that you can have an intelligent, or educated, guess at – rather than things where you just have to put a wet finger in the air to see which way the wind's blowing. This particular question, while it sounds like fun and you can easily come up with a considered guesstimate in a couple of minutes, should not have been asked – because there is no definitive answer. You might as well draw straws, as just see who can come closest to the answer that the question setter happens to have picked.

There is also another point, which is that there is currently no defined limit on the length of time that teams may take to answer tie–break questions – unless you infer that it's the same as for normal Knockout questions, which I don't think you can. Maybe this is something we should consider for the future.

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