The longest German words people actually use

The longest German word that people actually say, often enough to count, is Wohltätigkeitsveranstaltung — "charity event", 27 letters. We found it by going through 156 million words of German film and television dialogue and keeping only words said at least 100 times. The famous record-holders — the 63-letter beef-labelling law and its relatives — are not said once in the whole corpus.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 5 min read

The famous ones, and why nobody says them

German writes compounds as one word, so there is no upper limit on how long a word can be: add another noun to the front and you have a longer one. The record-holders people quote are real, but they are the work of legislators and word-game enthusiasts:

• Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (63 letters): "law on the delegation of duties for the supervision of beef labelling". It was passed by the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999, after the BSE crisis, and repealed in 2013.
• Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung (67 letters): an ordinance of 2003 on who may approve transfers of land. It was longer still, and it was repealed in 2007.
• Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (42 letters): "captain of the Danube Steamship Company". The company was real; the captain is a word game, extended at will by children and tongue-twister books.
• Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (36 letters): "motor vehicle liability insurance", a real and useful word — but people say Kfz-Versicherung, or just die Versicherung, and dictionaries print it with a hyphen.

In 156 million words of dialogue, these four are said 0 times between them.

The longest words that are really said

Here are the 20 longest words said at least 100 times, with how often each is said:

A few things are worth noticing.

They are all perfectly ordinary compounds. Wohltätigkeit ("charity") + s + Veranstaltung ("event"). Lebensmittel ("food") + Vergiftung ("poisoning"). Every one of them can be taken apart into words a learner already knows, joined, sometimes, by a linking -s-. This is why long German words look worse than they are: reading one is mostly a matter of finding the joins.

They are the vocabulary of the stories on screen. Search warrants, maximum-security prisons, defence ministries and life-support systems are where film and television spend their time, and a good share of German screen dialogue is dubbed from American series — hence the Sozialversicherungsnummer, a social security number. A corpus of kitchen conversations would give a different list; it would still be a list of compounds.

They are rare, but not freakishly rare. The top of the table is said roughly once in every million words: rare for any single word, but these are words a German speaker knows and uses without a second thought. What the table does not show is how many of them there are. A quarter of all the distinct word forms in the German corpus (25.2%) are fifteen letters or longer, against 3.6% in Spanish — but they make up only 0.58% of the words actually said. German has an enormous number of long words, and uses each one seldom.

The longest words you'll hear every day

The table above is about the extreme. Among the words a learner meets constantly, the longest are shorter and much more useful:

• The longest in the 1,000 most frequent words: Entschuldigung ("sorry; excuse me", 14 letters), number 560 in the list.
• In the first 5,000: selbstverständlich ("of course", 18 letters).
• In the first 10,000: Durchsuchungsbefehl ("search warrant", 19 letters).

Entschuldigung is the one to learn first: it is how you apologise, how you get past someone and how you get a waiter's attention, and it is said about 181 times in every million words.

Long words are not only a German speciality. A hill in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, carries one of the longest place names in the world — 85 letters in the spelling everyone quotes — and how it breaks into parts is in Māori place names and what they mean.

How we counted

• The corpus is the OpenSubtitles 2018 German frequency list compiled by Hermit Dave: every word form in 156 million words of subtitles, with its count. Words are counted as they are spelt, so Meinungsverschiedenheit and its plural are two entries.
• A word must be said at least 100 times — about 0.64 times per million words — to count as used. Below that, the list fills with one-off coinages and subtitle errors.
• Letters are counted as written, with ä, ö, ü and ß counting as one letter each, and only words made entirely of letters are considered.
• Three forms were removed by hand because they are not German words: a long run of ha, the German Mary Poppins's supercalifragilisticexpialigetisch, and Star Trek's Sternenflottenkommando ("Starfleet Command").
• The subtitle lists are lowercase; the capital letters on nouns were restored by hand.

Long compounds are one reason German needs the most words of any language here for 95% coverage, and one of the smaller reasons German is harder than it looks; a compound takes the gender of its last part, as German articles and gender explains. The German course teaches from the 1,000 most common German words up — Entschuldigung included.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz — the 1999 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern law, its repeal in 2013, and the 2003 ordinance repealed in 2007.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The list is computed by german_longest in scripts/frequency_extras.py, where the removed forms are listed with their reasons.