Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft is a compound word that serves as an example of the virtually unlimited compounding of nouns that is possible in many Germanic languages. According to the 1996 "Guinness Book of World Records", it is the longest word published in the German language.
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.