Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosi, or “ a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust,” trumps Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften by six letters. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Fahrvergnuegen (German). At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. As the Atlantic points out, however, English has got it beat. To these speakers the word may sound foreign.
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Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, or an insurance company that provides legal protection, is the language’s longest non-dictionary appearing word. As the LA Times reports, the longest German word with a dictionary entry currently is Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, or motor vehicle liability insurance. Though Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz was considered an official word, it never entered the dictionary. This, one hopes, is reassuring to people who have a fear of long words, or Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz became RkReÜAÜG, for example. To make such words more manageable, they’re often abbreviated. The language’s lengthy compound nouns have, inevitably, acquired their own compound noun: They are known as bandwurmwörter, or “tapeworm words.” Mark Twain, a student of German, called such words “alphabetical processions,” the LA Times reports. Sometimes, however, this system gets out of control. For example, Germans say platzangst – literally, space fear - rather than the borrowed Greek of “claustrophobia,” or the word dreirad – three wheel - when an English speaker would say “tricycle.” At its best, that brings a degree of simplicity to the language.
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In German, complex ideas are frequently captured by bolting together short nouns. A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor. The baseball capa common faux-hip ornament in today’s Germanyis. The English language has incorporated various loanwords, terms, phrases, or quotations from the German language. Think of these ‘loanwords’ as tiny pieces of German culture and language that have made their way into the English language. But a local parliament decided to repeal the law, making Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz obsolete, the Los Angeles Times reports. What Brits call a mobile and Americans call a cell phone, Germans call a Handy a word that looks borrowed from English, but isn’t. German loanwords, to be exact words that English speakers have ‘borrowed’, and use in more or less their original Germanic form. The longest word in the German language-the 63-letter-long Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz-was created to represent a law about beef regulation. There is a long list of long German words. Sometimes, they even show up in the real world.