It simply isn’t used often enough, in fact it doesn't occur at all in our corpus. But is this word part of our standard language? Certainly not. But some people have qualms about accepting this compound coinage as a word, probably owing to how rarely it occurs, which makes it a so-called “nonce word” or “occasionalism”. It is capitalized (like any German noun), with a space before and after it you can construct a female form ( Müllautohintendraufsteherin) and so on. minimal syntactic unit) with a meaning that we understand. Why? Because it’s a so-called formative (i.e. a garbage collector who stands on the back of a garbage truck) a word? Even if you've never heard the word before, yes, it is. Has the vocabulary grown so much so fast? How can we explain such a huge difference?įirst of all, we need to settle the question of what a word actually is. Recently, an analysis of the Dudenkorpus, our electronic collection of texts, came up with a count of 17.4 million base forms (i.e. Around the year 2000, during my first years as a Duden editor, the standard German lexis was estimated at 300,000 to 400,000 words. Computational linguistics methods now make it possible to determine far more accurately than ever before how big the language actually is. That was a brilliant stroke of false advertising of course because there’s no such thing – and never will be such a thing – as a 'complete' dictionary of German.īut how many words does the German language have anyway? This question has been a bone of contention in recent years.

Konrad Duden published his Vollständiges orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (“Complete Orthographic Dictionary of the German Language”) way back in 1880.

German words in english lexicon