Her unusually wide tongue was once her secret. Now it’s given her a world record

An American lawyer was once so secretive about her unusually wide tongue that she avoided giving even a glimpse of it to her legal office colleagues – but she has overcome her reticence and used the prodigious organ to clinch a Guinness World Record mark.

Brittany Lacayo of Houston, Texas, secured the organization’s title for female with the world’s widest tongue after hers came in wider than a hockey puck – and at about the same width as a credit card.

Lacayo’s tongue measured 7.90cm (3.11in) at its widest point, or the exact same distance as the average length of a woman’s entire tongue from the epiglottis to the tip, Guinness World Records said in an article published on its website recently.

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As she told it to Guinness, Lacayo had known her tongue was exceptional since she was a youngster because her family had teased her about it her whole life. It is wider than it is long, eliciting reactions of “shock” and “curiosity” when people first see, Lacayo told the organization, which is known for maintaining a database of about 40,000 world records.

She began entertaining the likelihood that her tongue was wider than anybody else’s alive when her best friend sent her a video of Emily Schlenker. Schlenker had held the Guinness World Record for the widest tongue among females at 7.33cm (2.89in) wide for about a decade. And Schlenker’s father, Byron, had once held the widest tongue mark among males.

Yet Lacayo had a hunch her tongue was wider than Emily Schlenker’s. She submitted the required measurements to Guinness, who in February verified Lacayo as the new record holder by a margin of 0.57cm (0.22in).

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Lacayo realized successfully taking aim at the record Schlenker set in 2015 meant she could no longer bite her tongue – such as it were – about her lingual girth. The criminal defense attorney said she was once so private about her tongue that she had been careful never to show it to her colleagues.

Nonetheless, she was leaning into the recognition that accompanies gaining recognition from Guinness World Records, which is frequently covered by the global media.

“It is neat,” she remarked to Guinness. “And kind of funny.”