When did Germany dump its longest word?
videograb from youtube
Rindfleischetikettie-rungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, the country’s longest word has officially been dropped from the dictionaries, recently. The noun, which consists of 63 letters, relates to a law on the testing of beef, according to reports.
A regional parliament discarded the word, meaning the ‘law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling’, after the EU lifted a recommendation to carry out BSE tests on healthy cattle, The Telegraph reported.
Germany generally is renowned for lengthy words, but even the most verbose of Germans wouldn’t really miss this word. Apparently, Germans add extra concepts to existing words, so that, in theory, a word could possibly never end!
Linguistics expert Professor Anatol Stefanowitsch, from the Free University of Berlin, told German news agency dpa that the word was the longest ‘authentic’ word in the language. With 36 letters, Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, which means motor vehicle liability insurance, is assumed to be the longest German word in the dictionary.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis from the Oxford Dictionary of English, which refers to ‘an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling a very fine ash and sand dust’ has 45 letters, and rules the roost.
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