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As slow as the music can go while still sounding like a pulse.
Printed above the staff as a heading, nearly always spelled out in full; it stays in force until another tempo word appears. Scores often pair it with a metronome mark, because the word alone gives an extreme rather than a speed.
The superlative of lento, and like larghissimo more a statement of character than a precise speed: stillness, suspension, time almost stopped. Reserve it for passages where the slowness itself is the effect, and make sure held notes and phrase lengths remain singable or bowable. A metronome mark does more than the superlative to stop performers from dragging the music past the point where it holds together.
Lentissimo is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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