According to Stefanowitsch, the German love of complex regulations and laws keeps creating new tapeworm words. “Most of the really long words usually come from legal texts.” But chemical terms are also sometimes of record-breaking length.
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The law on beef labeling was an example of a peculiarity of the German language: theoretically, infinitely long terms are possible in German without the word coming to an end. To show this, the German Language Society (GfdS) once jokingly created the term beef labeling monitoring task transfer law draft debate club discussion status reporting money application form. Finnish and Hungarian are similarly suitable for random word extensions, says GfdS managing director Andrea-Eva Ewels. “Every grammatical function is simply attached to the word.” It’s different in languages like Turkish or English. There, compound nouns are usually written apart, explains linguist Stefanowitsch. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the longest word in English is only 45 letters long: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the term for a lung disease known in Germany as silica silica lung.