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In May 2013, newspapers all over the world reported
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that German had lost its longest word.
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Really?
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How careless.
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The word in question was the last word
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in the title of a state law in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.
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That last word is 63 letters long:
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how did the German language manage to lose it?
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Well, of course it didn’t.
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The law was repealed, but the word continues to exist:
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I just used it myself.
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And how else are history teachers of the future supposed to talk about
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the causes and effects of this law?
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But by that logic, it was only the longest word until 2003,
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because we then got a law called...
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That’s longer by four letters.
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The law was repealed in 2007, but again, the word still exists.
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But what of the word listed in many editions of the Guinness Book of Records?
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This one.
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Seventy-nine letters!
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Unfortunately, that word doesn’t count.
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Why?
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Because it was never actually used for anything.
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It’s supposedly the name of an association,
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But nobody can find any evidence that this association ever existed.
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It’s a fake.
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Another fake monster German word is:
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That seems to have been invented for some kind of advertising campaign,
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but any sane German simply calls it an...
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Of course, the official titles of laws
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are not words that anyone would use in general conversation.
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They’re legal jargon;
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so although they’re words, they’re not very useful words
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unless they’re written down in legal documents.
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and even then, it’s more usual to use the official abbreviations.
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Although it is common to make new words in German
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simply by jamming together shorter words,
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there is a limit.
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Make a word too long, and even Germans get lost.
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In any case, the German language does have other techniques it can use as well;
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so in 1995, the Guinness Book of Records
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listed as the longest word in common usage:
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That’s still a respectable 39 letters,
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but even that’s a bit much for most Germans.
