An American lawyer was once so secretive about her unusually wide tongue that she wouldn’t even let her colleagues at the office catch a glimpse of it. However, she overcame her reticence and used the miraculous organ to set a Guinness World Record.
Brittany Lacayo of Houston, Texas, won the title of the woman with the widest tongue in the world after her tongue was measured to be wider than a hockey puck and about the same width as a credit card.
Lacayo’s tongue measured 7.90 cm (3.11 inches) across at its widest point. That’s exactly the same distance as the average length of a woman’s entire tongue, from the epiglottis to the tip, Guinness World Records reported in a recent article published on its website.
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As she told Guinness, Lacayo knew her tongue was unusual since she was little, because her family had teased her about it her entire life. The tongue is wider than it is long, which elicits reactions of “shock” and “curiosity” when people see it for the first time, Lacayo told the organization, which is known for maintaining a database of about 40,000 world records.
She started thinking her tongue was wider than someone else’s when her best friend sent her a video of Emily Schlenker. Schlenker held the Guinness World Record for the widest tongue among women at 7.33 cm (2.89 in) wide for about a decade. And Schlenker’s father, Byron, once had the widest tongue marking among men.
Still, Lacayo suspected her tongue was wider than Emily Schlenker’s. She submitted the required measurements to Guinness, which in February confirmed Lacayo as the new record holder by a margin of 0.57 cm (0.22 in).
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Lacayo realized that by successfully aiming for the record Schlenker had set in 2015, she could no longer bite her tongue—in effect, her tongue circumference. The criminal defense attorney said she was once so secretive about her tongue that she made sure never to show it to her colleagues.
Still, she enjoyed the recognition she received from Guinness World Records, which she regularly reported on in the international media.
“It’s fun,” she told Guinness. “And a little bit funny.”
