These are explained and discussed at Language Log.
Reposted from 2010 because the subject came up today in The New York Times:
The first thing that Grant Barrett, the chief lexicographer for Dictionary.com, wanted to emphasize was that the explosion of compound phrases like mob wife aesethetic, bookshelf wealth and goblin mode on TikTok and other social media platforms had been happening for centuries.“It is incredibly common in English, and goes as far back as Proto-Indo-European,” Mr. Barrett said, noting that linguists liked to playfully refer to these strings of attributive nouns as “noun piles.” He gave me an example of how far noun piling could be extended by offering the single yet six-word-long noun “station wagon car seat installation instructions.”
The article discusses other linguistic developments, including "cranberry morphemes" -"parts of words that look like they should exist independently, but don’t. The suffixes -aholic, -flation and -tastic have been the beneficiaries of similar trends through the years."
My German ancestors would like to remind everyone that you don't have to put spaces between the words. According to Berlitz...
Here are the top 3 longest words in the German dictionary in all their glory - along with their English meaning:3. RindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetzLetters: 63English meaning: Delegation transfer law for the labeling of beef in order to monitor task transfers.2. GrundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnungLetters: 67English meaning: Regulation on the delegation of authority concerning land conveyance permissions.1. RinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetzLetters: 79English meaning: Delegation transfer law for cattle labeling and beef labeling supervision duties.
Dangerously close to schizophasia word salad presentation confusion.
ReplyDeleteYeah, not just German - other languages as well (e.g. Latvian) allow you to create almost arbitrary length compounds.
ReplyDeleteSame for Dutch.
ReplyDeleteQuick google shows that the longest word appearing in the dictionary is
meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornis
or multiple personality disorder.
In the end, there is no longest word because you can keep piling nouns, whether you put spaces between them or not. As you can see from the German examples, the government is very, very good at this.
Surely the custodians of the German language (whoso they may be) have developed criteria for the (non)wordhood of combinations such as the three that you cite, which are actually the titles of official documents and of their nature will never occur in any other context? Says me, these are not "words" in any but the narrowest syntactic sense.
ReplyDeleteLike this one?
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
I doubt there are "custodians" of any languages (unless maybe the French) other than the compilers of dictionaries. The NYT article discusses the influence of Tik-Tok and other social media in the generation of neologisms.
these are not "words" in any but the narrowest syntactic sense.
DeleteHow are they not words? The fact that they're unusual does not mean they're not words.
Word
noun
a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.
And don't get started on the 'meaningful' part of the definition, because the longer the word (pile), the more meaning there is.