Asklemmy

47155 readers

462 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

What is the longest word in your language, and what does it mean in English? (feddit.uk)

submitted 4 days ago by Diddlydee@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I love the German word verbesserungsbedürftig, meaning in need of improvement. I'm not German, but thought this was a cracking word.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 6R1MR34P3R@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 days ago

Not the longest ones but the first that came to mind:

In French, one of the longest words is "anticonstitutionnellement", which means unconstitutionally. It's long but not something you'd use in daily conversation.

For Japanese, it's trickier because the language doesn’t really form long standalone words like German does. But if we count kanji compounds, something like "超電磁砲" (ちょうでんじほう, chōdenjihō), meaning railgun, is a cool one. Of course, technical or bureaucratic terms can get way longer, but they’re more like phrases than words.