The SC judge who used a 192-word sentence

A 192-word judgment delivered by Justice Dipak Misra in 2015 is being hailed as the longest English sentence ever used by a Supreme Court Judge in India.

In the judgment delivered on 19 March 2015, with Justice PC Pant, in the case of Priyanka Srivastava and Anr vs State of UP and Ors, Misra said that “the case before him was a frivolous litigation filed to harass and arm-twist the opposing party into agreeing to an out-of-court settlement.”

“Justice Misra’s frustration with the case, however, was particularly linked to the rampant abuse of a procedural provision,” according to an article in Legally India.

The judgment was mined by a Twitter user The Goan Patiala on May 24 and has been doing rounds on social media since.

The world record for the longest sentence

The world record for using the longest sentence in English is held by English novelist Jonathan Coe, who published a 13,855-word sentence in his 2001 book The Rotter’s Club. According to BookFox, a website that ranked 65 of the longest sentences in English, the sentence occupies 33 pages in the book.

However, another book The Blah Story, authored by Nigel Tomm, had a 2.4 million-word long sentence that ran through four book volumes. But litterateurs around the world don’t recognise Tomm’s sentence as the longest as it didn’t really meet the standards of proper English.