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James Joyce’s 628-page Finnegans Wake (1939), which took the Irish writer 17 years, is a notoriously “difficult” book. The first page opens:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

In the third paragraph, you’ll encounter this 100-letter word:

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

(!?) Seamus Deane writes of Finnegans Wake:

The language of the Wake is a composite of words and syllables combined with such a degree of fertile inventiveness that new sounds and new meanings are constantly ingeminated. Joyce involves himself ans us in an extremely complex series of translations that are endless because there is no original and no target language to supply a limit to the visual and sonar transactions that are negotiated by the text.

And, to explore the rich and heavily allusive language of this novel, let’s look at FWEET (Finnegans Wake Extensive Elucidation Treasury). The database contains nearly 100,000 annotations for Finnegans Wake in a convenient searchable format. What does it have to say about the long word we saw earlier?

Now, how about words related to the language of sanskrit throughout the text?

What about references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

Ok, Cicero?

(I’ve just taken a screenshot of the first few entries for these searches; many have hundreds/thousands of results.)

If you’d like, you can try out FWEET for yourself here. You might, however, want to familiarise yourself with how to operate the search function first, using this tutorial. Finnegans Wakes’ text is accessible here. Have fun; it’s an awesome tool, and an amazing novel!