German orthography
Compound words, including nouns, are written together, e.g. "Haustür" (Haus+Tür; house door), "Tischlampe" (Tisch+Lampe; table lamp), "Kaltwasserhahn" (Kalt+Wasser+Hahn; cold water tap/faucet). This can lead to long words: the longest word in regular use, "Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften" ("legal protection insurance companies"), consists of 39 letters; while the longest German word ever published ("Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", "Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services") has 79 letters.
Headword
The "Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian" contains around 500,000 headwords. The "Oxford English Dictionary" (OED) has around 273,000 headwords, while "Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary" has about 470,000. The "Deutsches Wörterbuch" (DWB), the largest lexicon of the German language, has around 330,000 headwords. These values are cited by the dictionary makers, and may not use exactly the same definition of a headword. In addition, headwords may not accurately reflect a dictionary's size. The "OED" and the "DWB", for instance, include exhaustive historical reviews and exact citations from source documents not usually found in standard dictionaries.