Lingua

Hide & Seek

German is a language famous for its compounds. It’s true that you can combine the words (preferably many, many nouns) until you arrive at something as illegible and incomprehensible as Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.

What I’ve been fascinated by recently are compound words that hide ‘something special’ in them, this week I took words with body parts hidden in them. These are words that have nothing to do with the body whatsoever but still one part of the word is traditionally speaking above all a body part.

Examples include:

Flaschenhals – it hides a body part in English too!

Verkehrsader – literally translated – traffic artery

Löwenzahn – lion’s tooth or is it?

Landzunge, Felsnase, Kohlkopf and many more…

There’s even a nice, tricky test on that! Enjoy!