Comparing lengths of words in strings

Question

Need to find the longest word in a string and print that word. 1.) Ask user to enter sentence separated by spaces. 2.)Find and print the longest word. If two or more words are the same length than print the first word.

this is what I have so far

def maxword(splitlist):      #sorry, still trying to understand loops
    for word in splitlist:
        length = len(word)
        if ??????

wordlist = input("Enter a sentence: ")
splitlist = wordlist.split()

maxword(splitlist)

I'm hitting a wall when trying to compare the lenghts of words in a sentance. I'm a student who's been using python for 5 weeks.

Answer 1

def longestWord(sentence):
    longest = 0   # Keep track of the longest length
    word = ''     # And the word that corresponds to that length
    for i in sentence.split():
        if len(i) > longest:
            word = i
            longest = len(i)
    return word

>>> s = 'this is a test sentence with some words'
>>> longestWord(s)
'sentence'