The longest words in German

I recently posted about German compound nouns and how they work. German is known for its inordinately long words and I started to wonder: Which words are considered the longest words in German? So I checked the German word bible, a.k.a. the Duden dictionary. The longest word — Kraftzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung — comes in at 36 letters. Here are the top 10 longest words listed in the dictionary, longest first. (If you want to know what they mean, click on the text of each word and an English definition will appear.)

However, these are certainly not the longest words in German. If you go searching for long words, you will find even longer ones. Schauspielerbetreuungsflugbuchungsstatisterieleitungsgastspielorganisationsspezialist comes in at 85 letters. Neunmilliardeneinhundertzweiundneunzigmillionensechshunderteinunddreißigtausendsiebenhundertsiebzigfache is 104 letters long. Duden does not include these words in its dictionary because they generally appear only once in the whole collection of German language texts that Duden examines. In fact, there is no limit on the length of compounds in German and the language allows for users to make their own compounds when a sought-after word doesn’t exist.

If we examine Duden’s text corpus of German and pinpoint only the words that appear at least four times in documented sources, these turn up as the longest words used in real German contexts. As above, the majority of words appear in the contexts of legal- and adminstrative-speak or are scientific terms.