Listen above to hear German journalist Sebastian Borger discussing German compound words, and why they keep multiplying. But a few of these compound terms convey singular emotions or ideas, like Götterdämmerung, usually translated as “Twilight of the Gods”. Many are ridiculously clunky and obscure: famously, there was Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, meaning “Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services”. While cardinal numbers above 1 million are written in German as a sequence of separate words (like 'zwei Milliarden fünfhundert Millionen'), ordinal numbers are always written as one word (see §36.1.6 in the official spelling rules). German, like Turkish and Finnish, is all too amenable to the construction of insanely long compound words. There is no longest German word because there is no largest natural number. Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung is a pretty long German word not the longest, though that consists of 37 letters. Aside from being exceedingly ugly, this 63-letter word has company (even if its buddies don’t trouble the inkwell quite so much). With that said, let’s take a look at the longest German words and have some fun trying to decipher them. Sign in Germany: “Wastewater treatment plant” (Wikimedia Commons) Germany has done away with what is arguably the longest word in the German language, a barely pronounceable word relating to a former law on the origin of beef: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.īut it isn’t much of a loss.
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