Topic summary
German compound
Extracted from the Wikipedia article German nouns.
Compounds
Unlike English compounds, German compound nouns are usually written together as a single word: 'spy satellite' is thus Spionagesatellit and 'mad cow disease' Rinderwahn. Compound nouns take the gender of the last component noun (the head). In special cases, German compounds are hyphenated, as in US-Botschaft ("US embassy") or 100-prozentig ("100 percent"). The English-speaking humorist and essayist Mark Twain noted, of the difficulty of reading German compounds as opposed to English compounds, which are more often hyphenated: "these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed. They are compound words with the hyphens left out."