What is the longest word in German?
Compound (linguistics)
Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also.
The longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. In German, extremely 
extendable compound words can be found in the language of chemical compounds, where, in the cases of biochemistry and polymers, they can be practically unlimited in length, mostly because the German rule suggests combining all noun adjuncts with the noun as the very last stem. German examples include (color television set), (radio remote control), and the often quoted jocular word (originally only two Fs, Danube steamboat shipping company captain['s] hat), which can of course be made even longer and even more absurd, e.g. "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenreinigungsausschreibungsverordnungsdiskussionsanfang" ("beginning of the discussion of a regulation on tendering of Danube steamboat shipping company captain hats") etc. According to several editions of the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest published German has 79 letters and is " Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft "("Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Electric[ity] Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam Shipping"), but there is no evidence that this association ever actually existed. The word is so absurd that it was obviously invented as a joke, which is emphasized by the illogical use of the plural of "electricity".
Longest words
The Bulgarian online etymological dictionary claims that longest word in Bulgarian to be the 39-letter-long ("), introduced in the Constitution of Bulgaria of 1947 (Dimitrov Constitution). The word means "do not perform actions against the constitution" (addressed to more than one person).
Names of Germany
The terminology for "Germany", the "German states" and "Germans" is complicated by the unusual history of Germany over the last 2000 years. This can cause confusion in German and English, as well in other languages. While the notion of "Germans" and "Germany" is older, it is only since 1871 that there has been a nation-state of Germany. Later political disagreements and the partition of Germany (1945–1990) has further made it difficult to use proper terminology.
Longest words
The longest word in Italian is traditionally ", which is a 26-letter-long adverb. It is formed by subsequent addition of postfixes to the original root:
Deutsches Wörterbuch
The Deutsches Wörterbuch (, "The German Dictionary"), abbreviated DWB, is the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of the German language in existence. Encompassing modern High German vocabulary in use since 1450, it also includes loanwords adopted from other languages into German. Entries cover the etymology, meanings, attested forms, synonyms, usage peculiarities, and regional differences of words found throughout the German speaking world. The dictionary's historical linguistics approach, illuminated by examples from primary source documents, makes it to German what the "Oxford English Dictionary" is to English. The first completed DWB lists over 330,000 headwords in 67,000 print columns spanning 32 volumes.
Hellschen-Heringsand-Unterschaar
Hellschen-Heringsand-Unterschaar is a municipality in the district of Dithmarschen, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is the municipality with the longest name in the country.
Wessi
There is also the name Besserwessi ("besser" meaning "better") which is a pun on "Besserwisser" ("know-it-all") and thus indicates a Wessi who feels superior to Ossis. Some former East Germans feel that former West Germans do not respect their culture and that East Germans were assimilated into West German culture, rather than the two cultures being united as equals. This term was named German Word of the Year in 1991. Politically speaking, in the German Reunification East Germany was indeed incorporated into West Germany under existing West German law. This solution was taken in order to legally avoid the necessity of creating a new constitution as demanded by the West German Grundgesetz, or Constitution.
List of placeholder names by language
German also sports a variety of placeholders; some, as in English, contain the element "Dings", "Dingens" (also "Dingenskirchen"), "Dingsda", "Dingsbums", cognate with English "thing". Also, "Kram", "Krimskrams", "Krempel" suggests a random heap of small items, e.g. an unsorted drawful of memorabilia or souvenirs. "Apparillo" (from "Apparat") may be used for any kind of machinery or technical equipment. In a slightly higher register, "Gerät" represents a miscellaneous artifact or utensil, or, in casual German, may also refer to an item of remarkable size. The use of the word "Teil" (part) is a relatively recent placeholder in German that has gained great popularity since the late 1980s. Initially a very generic term, it has acquired a specific meaning in certain contexts. "Zeug" or "Zeugs" (compare "Dings", can be loosely translated as 'stuff') usually refers to either a heap of random items that is a nuisance to the speaker, or an uncountable substance or material, often a drug. Finally, "Sache", as a placeholder, loosely corresponding to Latin "res", describes an event or a condition. A generic term used especially when the speaker cannot think of the exact name or number, also used in enumerations analogously to "et cetera", is the colloquial "schlag-mich-tot" or "schieß-mich-tot" (literally "strike/shoot me dead", to indicate that the speaker's memory fails him/her).
Fart (word)
The English word "fart" is one of the oldest words in the English lexicon. Its Indo-European origins are confirmed by the many cognate words in some other Indo-European languages: It is cognate with Greek verb πέρδομαι (perdomai), as well as the "pēdĕre", Sanskrit "pardate", Avestan "pərəδaiti", Italian "fare un peto", French "péter", Russian пердеть (perdet') and Polish "pierd" « PIE *perd [break wind loudly] or *pezd [the same, softly], all of which mean the same thing. Like most Indo-European roots in the Germanic languages, it was altered under Grimm's law, so that Indo-European "/p/" > "/f/", and "/d/" > "/t/", as the German cognate "furzen" also manifests.
Names of Germany
The Teutoni, a tribe with a name which probably came from the same root, did, through Latin, ultimately give birth to the English words "Teuton" (first found in 1530) for the adjective German, (as in the Teutonic Knights, a military religious order, and the Teutonic Cross) and "Teuton" (noun), attested from 1833. "Teuton" was also used for "Teutonisch Land" (land of the Teutons), it's abbreviation "Teutschland" used in some areas until the 19th century and it's currently used official variation "Deutschland".
God
The earliest written form of the Germanic word "God" comes from the 6th-century Christian "Codex Argenteus". The English word itself is derived from the Proto-Germanic * ǥuđan. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form was likely based on the root , which meant either "to call" or "to invoke". The Germanic words for "God" were originally neuter—applying to both genders—but during the process of the Christianization of the Germanic peoples from their indigenous Germanic paganism, the words became a masculine syntactic form.
In the English language, capitalization is used for names by which a god is known, including 'God'. Consequently, the capitalized form of "god" is not used for multiple gods (polytheism) or when used to refer to the generic idea of a deity.
The English word "God" and its counterparts in other languages are normally used for any and all conceptions and, in spite of significant differences between religions, the term remains an English translation common to all. The same holds for Hebrew "El", but in Judaism, God is also given a proper name, the tetragrammaton YHWH, in origin possibly the name of an Edomite or Midianite deity, Yahweh.
In many translations of the Bible, when the word "LORD" is in all capitals, it signifies that the word represents the tetragrammaton.
Germans
The native language of Germans is German, a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch, and sharing many similarities with the North Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. German has been replaced by English as the dominant language of science-related Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century. It was a lingua franca in the Holy Roman Empire.Global distribution of native speakers of the German language:
Longest word in English
The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared. In addition to words derived naturally from the language's roots (without any known intentional invention), English allows new words to be formed by coinage and construction; place names may be considered words; technical terms may be arbitrarily long. Length may be understood in terms of orthography and number of written letters, or (less commonly) phonology and the number of phonemes.
Convolution (computer science)
Let "x""x"... "x", "y""y"... "y", "z""z"... "z", ... be "n" words (i.e. finite sequences) of elements of Σ. Let formula_1 denote the length of the longest word, i.e. the maximum of |"x"|, |"y"|, |"z"|, ... .
Northern Germany
Although from the 19th century onwards the use of Standard German was strongly promoted especially by the Prussian administration, Low German dialects are still present in rural areas, with an estimated number of five to eight million active speakers. However, since World War II and the immigration of expellees from the former eastern territories of Germany, its prevalence has steadily reduced. Besides which, Frisian is spoken in East and North Frisia, as well as Danish (Standard and South Jutlandic) in parts of Schleswig. From a linguistic and cultural perspective, Northern Germany is linked to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and England. For example, the German word for butcher is "Fleischer" or "Metzger" in the middle, east or south of Germany but is called a "Schlachter" in Northern Germany, resembling the Scandinavian terms for butcher, "slagter/slakter". Other examples are the word for potato, which is "Erdapfel" in much of Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but "Kartoffel" in Northern Germany and in Danish; the North German verb "kieken" (meaning to look), resembling the Danish "kikke/kigge", or Norwegian "kikke" (to look); or the word for the fruit orange, which is "Orange" in standard German, but "Apfelsine" in Northern Germany, similarly to the Dutch ("appelsien/Sinaasappel"), Frisian ("aapelsiin") and Scandinavian languages ("appelsin/apelsin"). Additionally, Jansen/Janssen, Hansen, and Petersen are the most common surnames in the far north of Germany (Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein), which are also some of the most common surnames in Denmark (albeit with "Jensen" for Jansen). Hansen is the single most common surname in Norway, the third most common surname in Denmark, and the third and fifth most common surname in the North German federal states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg, respectively.
German language
Written texts in German are easily recognisable as such by distinguishing features such as umlauts and certain orthographical features – German is the only major language that capitalizes all nouns, a relic of a widespread practice in Northern Europe in the early modern era (including English for a while, in the 1700s) – and the frequent occurrence of long compounds. The longest German word that has been published is made of 79 characters. Because legibility and convenience set certain boundaries, compounds consisting of more than three or four nouns are almost exclusively found in humorous contexts. (In contrast, although English can also string nouns together, it usually separates the nouns with spaces. For example, "toilet bowl cleaner".)
Longest words
In December 2016 the 51-letter word " ("deferral of the second iteration of the federal presidential run-off election") was elected the Austrian Word of the Year 2016. The jury called it a "descriptive word" which "in terms of its content as well as its length, is a symbol and an ironic form of commentary for the political events of this year, characterized by the very long campaign for the presidential election, the challenges of the voting process, and its reiteration."
Transport in Germany
The Autobahn is the German federal highway system. The official German term is (plural "", abbreviated "BAB"), which translates as "federal motorway". Where no local speed limit is posted, the advisory limit "(Richtgeschwindigkeit)" is 130 km/h. The "Autobahn" network had a total length of about in 2016, which ranks it among the most dense and longest systems in the world. Only federally built controlled-access highways meeting certain construction standards including at least two lanes per direction are called ""Bundesautobahn"". They have their own, blue-coloured signs and their own numbering system. All "Autobahnen" are named by using the capital letter A, followed by a blank and a number (for example A 8).
German language
Reformer and theologian Martin Luther, who was the first to translate the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Among the most well known poets and authors in German are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, Heine, and Kafka. Thirteen German-speaking people have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Spitteler, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller.
Longest words
The longest word in Ojibwe language is "" (66 letters), meaning "blueberry pie". This literally translates to "blueberry cooked to jellied preserve that lies in layers in which the face is covered in bread".
Longest words
In German, whole numbers (smaller than 1 million) can be expressed as single words, which makes (777,777) a 65 letter word. In combination with or, as an inflected noun, , all numbers can be written as one word. A 79 letter word, , was named the longest published word in the German language by the 1972 Guinness Book of World Records, but longer words are possible. The word was the name of a prewar Viennese club for subordinate officials of the headquarters of the electrical division of the company named the , which operated steam boats on the Danube river.
German orthography
In 1880, Gymnasium director Konrad Duden published the "Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache" ("Complete Orthographic Dictionary of the German Language"), known simply as "the Duden". In the same year, the Duden was declared to be authoritative in Prussia. Since Prussia was, by far, the largest state in the German Empire, its regulations also influenced spelling elsewhere, for instance, in 1894, when Switzerland recognized the Duden.
Essen
In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for "eating" (written as lowercase "essen"), and/or the German noun for food (which is always capitalized as "Essen", adding to the confusion). Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of the name, there remain a few noteworthy interpretations. The oldest known form of the city's name is "Astnide", which changed to Essen by way of forms such as Astnidum, Assinde, Essendia and Esnede. The name Astnide may have referred either to a region where many ash trees were found or to a region in the East (of the Frankish Empire). The Old High German word for fireplace, Esse, is also commonly mentioned due to the industrial history of the city, but is highly unlikely since the old forms of the city name originate from times before industrialization.
German language in Namibia
Ist das? "oder" Isses?
Proto-Germanic language
By the end of the Proto-Germanic period, word-final long vowels were shortened to short vowels. Following that, overlong vowels were shortened to regular long vowels in all positions, merging with originally long vowels except word-finally (because of the earlier shortening), so that they remained distinct in that position. This was a late dialectal development, because the end result was not the same in all Germanic languages: word-final "ē" shortened to "a" in East and West Germanic but to "i" in Old Norse, and word-final "ō" shortened to "a" in Gothic but to "o" (probably ) in early North and West Germanic, with a later raising to "u" (the 6th century Salic law still has "maltho" in late Frankish).
Österreichisches Wörterbuch
The Österreichisches Wörterbuch (English: Austrian Dictionary), abbreviated ÖWB, is the official dictionary of the German language in the Republic of Austria. It is edited by a group of linguists under the authority of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture ("Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur"). It is the Austrian counterpart to the German "Duden" and contains a number of terms unique to Austrian German or that are more frequently used or differently pronounced there. A considerable amount of this "Austrian" vocabulary is also common in Southern Germany, especially Bavaria, and some of it is used in Switzerland as well. The most recent edition is the 43rd from 2017. Since the 39th edition from 2001 the orthography of the "ÖWB" was adjusted to the German spelling reform of 1996. This dictionary is also in official use in the Italian province of South Tyrol.
Wahlwort
By introducing wahlworts of different lengths at the beginning or the end of the sentence, sometimes both the beginning and the end, the length of the messages differ, which prevented or at least hindered the enemy from accessing it. The length of a wahlwort was usually between four and fourteen letters. The German code book gave as examples; “Wassereimer (bucket), Fernsprecher (telephone), Eichbaum (oak tree), Dachfirst (roof ridge), Kleiderschrank (wardrobe).” Wahlworts with only three letters occasionally appeared in the code, such as ABC or XXX, but also very long compounds, such as .
Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
Words as long as this are nowhere near common in German. When the law was proposed in the state parliament, the members reacted with laughter and the responsible minister Till Backhaus apologized for the "possibly excessive length".
In 1999, the German Language Society nominated "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" for its Word of the Year award, but it lost to das Millennium, a Latin word that gained in usage at that time, complementing the German word for millennium, "Jahrtausend".
Dreimorengesetz
Dreimorengesetz (, "three-mora rule") is a linguistic rule proposed by Hermann Hirt for placing the accent in a Germanic text. According to the rule, an enclitic cannot be more than three morae in length. That is, three shorts, a long and a short, or a short and a long. Within a single word the most that can follow the accent is a long and a short.
Longest words
, a railway station on the island of Anglesey in Wales, is the longest place name in the Welsh language. At 51 letters in the Welsh alphabet (the digraphs "ll" and "ch" are each collated as single letters) the name can be translated as "St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave". However, it was artificially contrived in the 1860s as a publicity stunt, to give the station the longest name of any railway station in the United Kingdom.
German language
Whether any particular vowel letter represents the long or short phoneme is not completely predictable, although the following regularities exist:
Both of these rules have exceptions (e.g. "has" is short despite the first rule; , "moon" is long despite the second rule). For an "i" that is neither in the combination "ie" (making it long) nor followed by a double consonant or cluster (making it short), there is no general rule. In some cases, there are regional differences: In central Germany (Hessen), the "o" in the proper name "Hoffmann" is pronounced long, whereas most other Germans would pronounce it short; the same applies to the "e" in the geographical name "Mecklenburg" for people in that region. The word "cities", is pronounced with a short vowel by some (Jan Hofer, ARD Television) and with a long vowel by others (Marietta Slomka, ZDF Television). Finally, a vowel followed by "ch" can be short ( "compartment", "kitchen") or long ( "search", "books") almost at random. Thus, is homographous between "puddle" and "manner of laughing" (colloquial) or "laugh!" (imperative).
Bundesautobahn 40
It has officially been named Ruhrschnellweg (Ruhr Fast Way), but locals usually call it Ruhrschleichweg (Ruhr Crawling Way) or "the Ruhr area's longest parking lot". According to "Der Spiegel", it is the most congested motorway in Germany.
In the city of Essen, a Stadtbahn service operates on the median of the A 40 between Tunnel Ruhrschnellweg and Mülheim-Heißen. Between the Essen-Huttrop and the Essen-Kray junctions, there is a guided bus system called Spurbus.
Longest words
Icelandic has the ability to form compounds of arbitrary length by stringing together genitives (), so no single words of maximal length exist in the language. However, and are sometimes cited as particularly long words; the latter has 64 letters and means "a keychain ring for the outdoor key of road workers shed in a moor called Vaðlaheiði".
Word of the year (Germany)
The word of the year () is an annual publication by the "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache", established in 1971 (on a regular basis since 1977). Each December, a German word or word group is named in a linguistic review of the year.
Taxation in Germany
Taxes in Germany are levied by the federal government ("Bund"), the states ("Länder") as well as the municipalities ("Städte/Gemeinden"). Many direct and indirect taxes exist in Germany; income tax and VAT are the most significant. The German word for tax is "die Steuer" which originates from the Old High German word "stiura" meaning "help". The Financial Secrecy Index ranks Germany as the 8th safest tax haven in the world, ahead of Jersey but behind Lebanon.
Longest words
The word is never used in every-day language, but in jokes. Nevertheless, it is an official part of Italian language; it was coined in 1677 by poet Francesco Moneti:
Longest words
', with 44 letters is one example of a long word in the Hungarian language and means something like "for your [plural] continued behaviour as if you could not be desecrated". It is already morphed, since Hungarian is an agglutinative language. The language does not have a "longest word" due to its agglutinating nature. It is always possible to construct a longer one with enough creativity. For example, ' (119 letters), which means: "About your investigations of the upgradeability of the manifestation of the syndrome of the neurosis about the need to decide which is the world record of the most complex longest word."
Names of Germany
The OED2 records theories about the Celtic roots of the Latin word "Germania": one is "gair", neighbour (a theory of Johann Zeuss, a German historian and Celtic philologist) – in Old Irish "gair" is "neighbour". Another theory is "gairm", battle-cry (put forward by Johann Wachter and Jacob Grimm, who was a philologist as well as collector and editor of fairy tales). Yet another theory is that the word comes from "ger", "spear"; however, Eric Partridge suggests "*gar" / "gavin", to shout (as Old Irish "garim"), describing the Germanic tribesmen as noisy. He describes the "ger" theory as "obsolete".
German language
Like the other Germanic languages, German forms noun compounds in which the first noun modifies the category given by the second,: ("dog hut"; specifically: "dog kennel"). Unlike English, whose newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written in "open" with separating spaces, German (like some other Germanic languages) nearly always uses the "closed" form without spaces, for example: ("tree house"). Like English, German allows arbitrarily long compounds in theory (see also English compounds). The longest German word verified to be actually in (albeit very limited) use is , which, literally translated, is "beef labelling supervision duty assignment law" [from (cattle), (meat), (labelling), (supervision), (duties), (assignment), (law)]. However, examples like this are perceived by native speakers as excessively bureaucratic, stylistically awkward or even satirical.
Abrogans
Abrogans, also German Abrogans or Codex Abrogans (St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 911), is a Middle Latin–Old High German glossary, whose preserved copy in the Abbey Library of St Gall is regarded as the oldest preserved book in the German language.
Rennsteig Tunnel
Rennsteig Tunnel (German: Rennsteigtunnel) is the longest road tunnel in Germany with a length of 7,878 meters (4.919 mi).
Elbe (ship)
Elbe, was a 1,693 ton, three-masted, iron sailing ship with a length of 257 feet, breadth of 38.2 feet and depth of 23.1 feet. She was built by Russel & Company in Glasgow for the Nourse Line, named after the River Elbe the longest river in Germany and launched in July 1887. She was primarily used for the transportation of Indian indentured labourers to the colonies. Details of some of these voyages are as follows:"Elbe"s third trip to Fiji was historic because it brought the first labourers from Madras to Fiji for the first time. Most South Indians were Tamil speakers but other languages such as Telugu and Malayalam were also represented. Conditions on board were good for the time, with regular nutritious food, plenty of exercise and an on-board hospital, and as a result there was a mortality of less than one percent.
Euouae
According to the "Guinness Book of World Records", at six letters long, "Euouae" is the longest word in the English language made up of nothing but vowels (the v spelling notwithstanding), and also the English word with the most consecutive vowels. As a mnemonic coming from Latin, it is unclear that it should count as an English word; however, it is found in the unabridged Collins English Dictionary.
Till Backhaus
The is defined using a grammatically valid and usable compound noun of 63 letters. The word featured in the "Guinness Book of Records" until 1996 when it was controversially challenged for the top spot by the creation of a longer word. But for many the word created by Backhaus's ministry was toppled from its position as Germany's longest official word only in 2013 when it was withdrawn from use by the regional assembly because the law it defined had been repealed.
Longest word in Turkish
The word ""Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine"" (70 letters) was proposed by Koksal Karakus as the longest word in Turkish.
Its use is illustrated by the following situation:
"Kötü amaçların güdüldüğü bir öğretmen okulundayız. Yetiştirilen öğretmenlere öğrencileri nasıl muvaffakiyetsizleştirecekleri öğretiliyor. Yani öğretmenler birer muvaffakiyetsizleştirici olarak yetiştiriliyorlar. Fakat öğretmenlerden biri muvaffakiyetsizleştirici olmayı, yani muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştirilmeyi reddediyor, bu konuda ileri geri konuşuyor. Bütün öğretmenleri kolayca muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriverebileceğini sanan okul müdürü bu duruma sinirleniyor, ve söz konusu öğretmeni makamına çağırıp ona diyor ki: "Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine laflar ediyormuşsunuz ha?""
"We are in a teachers' training school that has evil purposes. The teachers who are being educated in that school are being taught how to make unsuccessful ones from students. So, one by one, teachers are being educated as makers of unsuccessful ones. However, one of those teachers refuses to be maker of unsuccessful ones, in other words, to be made a maker of unsuccessful ones; he talks about and criticizes the school's stand on the issue. The headmaster who thinks every teacher can be made easily/quickly into a maker of unsuccessful ones gets angry. He invites the teacher to his room and says "You are talking as if you were one of those we can not easily/quickly turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones, right?"
A German Requiem (Brahms)
A German Requiem, to Words of the Holy Scriptures, Op. 45 () by Johannes Brahms, is a large-scale work for chorus, orchestra, a soprano and a baritone soloist, composed between 1865 and 1868. It comprises seven movements, which together last 65 to 80 minutes, making this work Brahms's longest composition. "A German Requiem" is sacred but non-liturgical, and unlike a long tradition of the Latin "Requiem", "A German Requiem", as its title states, is a "Requiem" in the German language.
Jacob Wackernagel
Another law named after him (Wackernagel 1889) is Wackernagel's law of lengthening ("Dehnungsgesetz" in German), also sometimes known as the law of lengthening in composition ("Regelung der Dehnung in der Zusammensetzung"): in some compound words in Greek the first ingredient ends with a vowel and the second ingredient begins with a vowel; when "neither vowel is high" the first vowel is without effect and the second is replaced by its long counterpart.
Compound (linguistics)
Some languages easily form compounds from what in other languages would be a multi-word expression. This can result in unusually long words, a phenomenon known in German (which is one such language) as "Bandwurmwörter" or "tapeworm words".
Perger
Perger is a surname, which is an older version of "Berger". The first letter did not change from "P" to "B", which was common in the late Middle Ages. The word "Perg" or later "Berg" means mountain, so the name describes someone, who lived on a mountain. Mostly that persons were related to the government, or they were the governor of their region one millennium ago. Someone in this position was the lord of the mountain. In old German language that would be the "Herr vom Perg" or the "Pergherr", which is the origin of "Perger". The name comes quite likely from the German-speaking part of the Alps, which is Austria (with its languages Burgenland Croatian, Slovene, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Romani), Germany (Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg), South Tyrol in Italy (with its languages German, Italian, and Ladin), and Switzerland (with its languages German, French, Italian, and Romansh), but it could be originated everywhere in the German language area, where a hill or a mountain was populated. In comparison to the name "Berger" it is rather rare. A similar even rarer name with the same meaning is "Pergher" or "Bergher", still displaying the "h". The reason for the varying spellings is the development of the German language in different regions of the German language area and its regions of language transitions in the last thousand years.
Deutschlandsender
Deutschlandsender (, "Radio Germany"), abbreviated DLS or DS, was one of the longest-established radio broadcasting stations in Germany. The name was used between 1926 and 1993 to denote a number of powerful stations designed to achieve all-Germany coverage.
Longest word in Spanish
This article describes some of the longest words in the Spanish language.
Nora Nova
After she came to West Germany in 1960, she won a singing contest called "Die große Chance" ("The Great Chance") organized by Electrola, a German recording company. After scoring a number of hits in the German and Swiss charts, in 1964 she was chosen to represent West Germany at the Copenhagen Eurovision Song Contest finals. Her song, Man gewöhnt sich so schnell an das Schöne, reportedly has the longest name in Eurovision Song Contest history. With it she had another record — nul points for West Germany, and hence 13th, last place.
German Reference Corpus
The German Reference Corpus (original: Deutsches Referenzkorpus; short: DeReKo) is an electronic archive of text corpora of contemporary written German. It was first created in 1964 and is hosted at the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The corpus archive is continuously updated and expanded. It currently comprises more than 4.0 billion word tokens (as of August 2010) and constitutes the largest linguistically motivated collection of contemporary German texts. Today, it is one of the major resources worldwide for the study of written German.
Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift
Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift (“DEK”, German Unified Shorthand) is a German stenography system.
DEK is the official shorthand system in Germany and Austria today.
It is used for word-for-word recordings of debates in the Federal Parliament of Germany.
Duden
The () is a dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880. The " is updated regularly with new editions appearing every four or five years. , it is in its 27th edition. It is printed as twelve volumes, with each volume covering different aspects of the German language such as loanwords, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, etc.
Tuisto
The "Germania" manuscript corpus contains two primary variant readings of the name. The most frequently occurring, Tuisto, is commonly connected to the Proto-Germanic root "*twai" – "two" and its derivative "*twis" – "twice" or "doubled", thus giving Tuisto the core meaning "double". Any assumption of a gender inference is entirely conjectural, as the tvia/tvis roots are also the roots of any number of other concepts/words in the Germanic languages. Take for instance the Germanic "twist", which, in all but the English has the primary meaning of "dispute/conflict".
Germany
The English word "Germany" derives from the Latin , which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. The German term , originally ("the German lands") is derived from (compare "Dutch"), descended from Old High German "popular" (i.e. belonging to the or "people"), originally used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic "popular" (see also the Latinised form ), derived from , descended from Proto-Indo-European *"" "people", from which the word "Teutons" also originates.
Infinitive
In German it is "-en" ("sagen"), with "-eln" or "-ern" endings on a few words based on -l or -r roots ("segeln", "ändern"). The use of "zu" with infinitives is similar to English "to", but is less frequent than in English. German infinitives can form nouns, often expressing abstractions of the action, in which case they are of neuter gender: "das Essen" means "the eating", but also "the food".
Longest words
" (176 letters, meaning "of 999,999,999,999 years old").
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.
German language
In German, vowels (excluding diphthongs; see below) are either "short" or "long", as follows:
List of terms used for Germans
There are many alternative terms for the people of Germany. In English the demonym, or noun, is German. During the early Renaissance, "German" implied that the person spoke German as a native language. Until German unification, people living in what is now Germany were named for the region they lived in: examples are Bavarians and Brandenburgers.
Names of Germany
Among the indigenous peoples of North America of former French and British colonial areas, the word for "Germany" came primarily as a borrowing from either French or English. For example, in the Anishinaabe languages, three terms for "Germany" exist: ᐋᓂᒫ ("Aanimaa", originally "Aalimaanh", from the French "Allemagne"), ᑌᐦᒋᒪᓐ ("Dechiman", from the English "Dutchman") and ᒣᐦᔭᑴᑦ ("Meyagwed", Ojibwe for "foreign speaker" analogous to Slavic "Némcy" "Mutes" and Arab (ajam) "mute"), of which "Aanimaa" is the most common of the terms to describe Germany.
Longest words
The longest word in Catalan is considered to be ', an adverb meaning "[done in a way that is] against the constitution", however, the scientific word ', related to endocrinology has been proposed by the University of Barcelona to be the true longest word.
Song of the Bell
The "Song of the Bell" (German: "Das Lied von der Glocke", also translated as "The Lay of the Bell") is a poem that the German poet Friedrich Schiller published in 1798. It is one of the most famous poems of German literature and with 430 lines also one of the longest. In it, Schiller combines a knowledgeable technical description of a bell founding with points of view and comments on human life, its possibilities and risks.
Longest words
The longest word in any given language depends on the word formation rules of each specific language, and on the types of words allowed for consideration.
Eider (river)
The Eider (; ; Latin: "Egdor" or "Egdore") is the longest river in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The river starts near Bordesholm and reaches the southwestern outskirts of Kiel on the shores of the Baltic Sea, but flows to the west, ending in the North Sea. The lower part of the Eider was used as part of the Eider Canal until that canal was replaced by the modern Kiel Canal.
Longest words
The longest word that is not created artificially as a longest-word record seems to be at 63 letters. The word means "law delegating beef label monitoring" but as of 2013, it was removed from the books because European Union regulations have changed and that particular law became obsolete, leading to news reports that Germany "had lost its longest word".
Historical dictionary
The largest historical dictionary of German is the "Deutsches Wörterbuch" originally compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and completed after their death in 1961. A second edition of the letters A–F is due for completion in 2017.
Longest words
The 45-letter word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest English word that appears in a major dictionary.
H
In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced . Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word ('heighten'), the second is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent in nearly all instances of in native German words such as "thun" ('to do') or "Thür" ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as ('theater') and ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with even after the last German spelling reform.
Longest words
The longest accepted neologism is " (30 letters)..
List of German dictionaries
This list includes notable historic, standardized and common use dictionaries of the German language. The beginnings of German dictionaries date back to a series of glossaries from the 8th century CE. The first comprehensive German dictionary, the "Deutsches Wörterbuch" (DWB), was begun by the Brothers Grimm in 1838. The "Duden" dictionary, begun in 1880 and now in its 25th edition, is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The official dictionary for Austrian German, the "Österreichisches Wörterbuch" (ÖWB), is published by the Austrian Federal Government and is now in its 41st edition.
List of terms used for Germans
The term "Wessi", derived from the German word "Westen" which means west, is used in Germany for people who were born or live in the old states of Germany (those that formed the Federal Republic or "West Germany" before reunification). Sometimes it is also modified to "Besserwessi", from the German word "Besserwisser" which means Know-it-all, which reflects the stereotype that people from the Western part of Germany are arrogant.
Germanic strong verb
The Proto-Germanic language most likely used more than 500 strong roots. Although some roots are speculative, the language can be reconstructed with the following strong roots based on the work of Elmar Seebold (1970), Robert Mailhammer (2007) and Guus Kroonen (2013).
Proto-Germanic had aorist-present roots, a remnant of the aorist aspect found in Proto-Indo-European. These verbs used the former aorist as a present tense form. The aorist had a zero-grade vowel, like parts 3 and 4 of the perfect. So these verbs have an anomalous vowel in the present tense, they decline regularly otherwise.Being the oldest Germanic language with any significant literature, it is not surprising that Gothic preserves the strong verbs best. However, some changes still occurred:Also, long "ī" was spelled in Gothic.
Erika Fuchs
She also used verbs shortened to their stems not only to imitate sounds (onomatopoeia), such as "schluck", "stöhn", "knarr", "klimper" (gulp, groan, creak, chink/jingle), but also to represent soundless events: "grübel", "staun", "zitter" (ponder, goggle, tremble). The word for these soundwords in German is now an "Erikativ", a tongue-in-cheek word utilizing Fuchs's first name, made to resemble grammatical terms such as "Infinitiv" (infinitive), "Indikativ" (indicative mood), "Akkusativ" (accusative case), etc. "Erikative" are commonly used in Internet forums and chatrooms to describe what people are doing as they write, which has become the common German form of the Internet slang behavior known in English as emoting. English examples: *ducks*, *runs away*, etc. The "Erikativ" is the German form of those ("*duck*", "*weglauf*", respectively).
Etymological Dictionary of the German Language
The Etymological Dictionary of the German Language is a reference book for the history of the German language, and was one of the first books of its kind ever written. Originally written in 1883 by Friedrich Kluge, it is still actively maintained and considered a standard work among the German etymological dictionaries. The most recent publication was released in 2011 in print, eBook and as an Android app.
Old High German
Old High German (OHG, , German abbr. ) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 700 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as "prehistoric" (including the Proto-Germanic language) and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason. There are, however, a number of Elder Futhark inscriptions dating to the 6th century (notably the Pforzen buckle), as well as single words and many names found in Latin texts predating the 8th century.
Obsolete German units of measurement
Distance between elbow and fingertip. In the North, often 2 feet, In Prussia  feet, in the South variable, often  feet. The smallest known German "Elle" is , the longest .
German language
The Dortmund-based , which was founded in 1997, supports the German language and is the largest language association of citizens in the world. The VDS has more than thirty-five thousand members in over seventy countries. Its founder, statistics professor Dr. Walter Krämer, has remained chairperson of the association from its beginnings.
Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany
The German word Grundgesetz may be translated as either "Basic Law" or "Fundamental Law" ("Grund-" is cognate with the English word "ground"). The term "Verfassung" (constitution) was deliberately avoided as the drafters regarded the "Grundgesetz" as an interim arrangement for a provisional West German state, expecting that an eventual reunified Germany would adopt a proper constitution, enacted under the provisions of Article 146 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that such a constitution must be "freely adopted by the German people". Nevertheless, although the amended Basic Law would finally be approved in 1990 by all four Allied Powers (who thereby relinquished their continued reserved constitutional rights), it was never submitted to a popular vote, neither in 1949 nor in 1990.
Kettler
The popularity of the Kettcar in Germany is so immense that the word "Kettcar" has become a synonym for four wheeled pedal cars and was entered into the "Duden", the official German dictionary, describing it as a "pedal powered chain vehicle for children" The first four letters of the word Kettcar are derived from the company "Kettler" and the German word for chain, "kette". The last three letters are derived from the word "car".
Leutnant
The German noun (with the meaning “Stellvertreter” (in English "deputy") from Middle High German «locum tenens» Platzhalter (in English "place holder") was derived from the French word «Lieutenant» about 1500. In most German-speaking armies it is the lowest officer rank (in German-speaking navies «Leutnant zur See» (English "Lieutenant at sea"). In the German Bundeswehr the ranks "Leutnant" OF1b and "Oberleutnant" OF1a belong to the "Leutnant" rank group. In some other armed forces (such as the former National People's Army) there is the lower grade of Unterleutnant (OR1c).
Habseligkeiten
This German word is usually used in its plural form Habseligkeiten. It refers to the paltry belongings of an almost penniless person. "Habseligkeiten" was chosen as the most beautiful German word in October 2004 in a competition initiated by the Goethe Institute and the Council for the German Language. The nomination points out that the word combines two completely opposite areas of life: worldly belongings ("hab" from "haben", "to have") and the eternal search for happiness ("Seligkeit", a state of bliss or of being blessed). It argues that this tension causes the observer to feel sympathy towards the owner of such belongings.
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon
It is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek word λοπαδο­τεμαχο­σελαχο­γαλεο­κρανιο­λειψανο­δριμ­υπο­τριμματο­σιλφιο­καραβο­μελιτο­κατακεχυ­μενο­κιχλ­επι­κοσσυφο­φαττο­περιστερ­αλεκτρυον­οπτο­κεφαλλιο­κιγκλο­πελειο­λαγῳο­σιραιο­βαφη­τραγανο­πτερύγων. Liddell & Scott (LSJ) translate this as "name of a dish compounded of all kinds of dainties, fish, flesh, fowl, and sauces."
The Greek word has 172 letters and 78 syllables. The transliteration has 182 Latin characters. It is the longest word ever to appear in literature according to Guinness World Records (1990).
The Memorandum
Length of words, like everything else in Ptydepe, is determined scientifically. The vocabulary of Ptydepe uses entropy encoding: shorter words have more common meanings. Therefore, the shortest word in Ptydepe, "gh", corresponds to what is so far known to be the most general term in natural language, "whatever". (The longest word in Ptydepe, which contains 319 letters, is the word for "wombat" in an English translation. However in the Czech original it is a name for a nonexistent member of the genus Apus, rorýs říční.) Theoretically an even shorter word than "gh" exists in Ptydepe, namely "f", but it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than "whatever" is discovered.
German language
A proper use of the long s, (), ſ, is essential for writing German text in Fraktur typefaces. Many Antiqua typefaces include the long s also. A specific set of rules applies for the use of long s in German text, but nowadays it is rarely used in Antiqua typesetting. Any lower case "s" at the beginning of a syllable would be a long s, as opposed to a terminal s or short s (the more common variation of the letter s), which marks the end of a syllable; for example, in differentiating between the words (guard-house) and (tube of polish/wax). One can easily decide which "s" to use by appropriate hyphenation, ( vs. ). The long s only appears in lower case.
Longest words
Traditionally, the word " (31 letters) is considered as the longest Slovak word, but there are some longer artificial words. Most of them are compound adjectives in dative, instrumental or other grammatical case and derived from the iterative or frequentative verbal form or the ability adjective form (like -able).
Artificial words, lexically valid but never used in language:
List of terms used for Germans
The term Marmeladinger originated in the trenches of World War I. It is derived from the German word "Marmelade", which is a fruit preserve. While Austrian infantry rations included butter and lard as spread, German troops had to make do with cheaper "Marmelade" as ersatz. They disdainfully called it "Heldenbutter" "hero's butter" or "Hindenburgfett". This earned them ridicule from their Austrian allies who would call them "Marmeladebrüder" (jam brothers) or "Marmeladinger" (-"inger" being an Austrian derivational suffix describing a person through a characteristic item or action). Germans would conversely call Austrians "Kamerad Schnürschuh" "comrade lace-up shoe" because the Austrian infantry boots used laces while the German boots did not. This term has survived, but it is rarely used.
Angst
In other languages, having the meaning of the Latin word for "fear", the derived words differ in meaning; for example, as in the French and . The word "angst" has existed since the 8th century, from the Proto-Indo-European root "", "restraint" from which Old High German developed. It is pre-cognate with the Latin , "tensity, tightness" and , "choking, clogging"; compare to the Ancient Greek () "strangle".
Agglutination
English is capable of agglutinating morphemes of solely Germanic origin, as "un-whole-some-ness", but generally speaking the longest words are assembled from forms of Latin or Ancient Greek origin. The classic example is "antidisestablishmentarianism". Agglutinative languages often have more complex derivational agglutination than isolating languages, so they can do the same to a much larger extent. For example, in Hungarian, a word such as , which means "for [the purposes of] undenationalizationability" can find actual use. In the same way, there are the words that have meaning, but probably are never used such as , which means "like the most of most undesecratable ones of you", but is hard to decipher even for native speakers. Using inflectional agglutination, these can be extended. For example, the official Guinness world record is Finnish "I wonder if – even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized". It has the derived word as the root and is lengthened with the inflectional endings "-llänsäkäänköhän". However, this word is grammatically unusual, because "-kään" "also" is used only in negative clauses, but "-kö" (question) only in question clauses.
Culture of Germany
Standard German is a West Germanic language and is closely related to and classified alongside English, Dutch, and the Frisian languages. To a lesser extent, it is also related to the East (extinct) and North Germanic languages. Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Significant minorities of words are derived from Latin and Greek, with a smaller amount from French and most recently English (known as Denglisch). German is written using the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with Umlaut, namely ä, ö, and ü, as well as the Eszett or "scharfes S" ("sharp s") which is written "ß". German orthography has gone through a series of reforms, the most recent in 1996.
Longest words
Mongolian is an agglutinative language. Words can get longer by adding suffixes. So, the longest suffixed word in Mongolian is "" () which is 26 letters long. Here is a table showing, with translations, which suffixes are added.
Names of Germany
The Slavic exonym "nemets", "nemtsy" derives from Proto-Slavic "němьcь", pl. "němьci", 'the mutes', 'not able (to speak)' (from adjective "němъ" 'mute' and suffix -"ьcь"). It literally means "a mute" and can be also associated with similar sounding "not able", "without power", but came to signify "those who can't speak (like us); foreigners". The Slavic autonym (Proto-Slavic "*Slověninъ") likely derives from "slovo", meaning "word". According to a theory, early Slavs would call themselves the "speaking people" or the "keepers of the words", as opposed to their Germanic neighbors, the "mutes" (a similar idea lies behind Greek "barbaros", barbarian and Arab عجم (ajam), "mute)". At first, "němьci" may have been used for any non-Slav foreigners, later narrowed to just Germans. The plural form is used for the Germans instead of any specific country name, e.g. "Niemcy" in Polish and "Ńymcy" in Silesian dialect. In other languages, the country's name derives from the adjective "němьcьska (zemja)" meaning 'German (land)' (f.i. Czech "Německo"). Belarusian ("Nyamyecchyna"), Bulgarian ("Nemtsiya") and Ukrainian ("Nimecchyna") are also from "němьcь" but with the addition of the suffix -"ina".
Longest words
", at 70 letters, has been cited as the longest Turkish word. It was used in a contrived story designed to use this word. The word means "As if you would be from those we can not easily/quickly make a maker of unsuccessful ones" and its usage was illustrated as follows: 
" ' ' ' ' ' "' "
"We are in a teachers' training school that has evil purposes. The teachers who are being educated in that school are being taught how to make unsuccessful ones from students. So, one by one, teachers are being educated as makers of unsuccessful ones. However, one of those teachers refuses to be maker of unsuccessful ones, in other words, to be made a maker of unsuccessful ones; he talks about and criticizes the school's stand on the issue. The headmaster who thinks every teacher can be made easily/quickly into a maker of unsuccessful ones gets angry. He invites the teacher to his room and says "You are talking as if you were one of those we can not easily/quickly turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones, right?"
Other well-known very long Turkish words are:
Plautdietsch language
The most problematic words are those with an -e plural ending in German. Although the entire class with no ending is made out of them, many other words are treated differently. For example, the plurals for Stool and Stock (chair and stick) are Steela and Stakja (compare German Stuhl, Stühle; Stock, Stöcke). Since they have their vowels fronted there seems to be no reason for the -a ending. Many others have been moved into the -en class: Jeboot, Jebooten (commandment/s, German: Gebot, Gebote). With some not so common words, there is no certainty about the correct plural, different speakers create them in different ways: the plural of Jesaz (law) could be Jesaza or Jesazen (German: Gesetz, Gesetze).
...ish (audio drama)
The Omniverbum is the mythical longest word in existence. According to records, no one who has found the Omniverbum, or its sentient affix "Ish", has lived to tell of it. Except one. Book found the Ish on an obscure world and accidentally brought back to the college as per his programming. But now it's escaped, and is out to cause havoc on the speech centers of the human brain unless The Doctor can stop it.
Dachshund
The name "dachshund" is of German origin and literally means "badger dog," from "Dachs" ("European badger") and "Hund" ("hound, dog"). The pronunciation varies widely in English: variations of the first and second syllables include , and , , . Although "dachshund" is a German word, in modern German they are more commonly known by the short name "Dackel" or "Teckel". The German word is pronounced .
Longest words
The word often said to be the longest in Dutch – probably because of its funny meaning and alliteration – which has also appeared in print, is " ("construction ground for the Hottentot soldiers' tents exhibition"); counting 53 letters.
Longest words
The longest Lithuanian word is 40 letters long:
Word of the year
The German tradition, "Wort des Jahres" was started in 1971. The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year is the oldest English-language version, and the only one that is announced after the end of the calendar year, determined by a vote of independent linguists, and not tied to commercial interest. However, various other organizations also announce Words of the Year for promotional purposes.