The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

This word was cleverly coined in 1935 by puzzle enthusiasts aiming to build the longest English word possible, and it later made its way into reference books like the Oxford English Dictionary and ...

For my purposes here and now, I would make the case for a regular, easy to pronounce, word as being the longest word. You may have heard this before, but I’m reminding you now, that “smiles” is, by ...