The joy of compound words

Effective public speaking depends on choosing specific words to describe our ideas. Frequently those are compound words, especially nouns. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a compound as: “A word consisting of components that are words.”

Often (but not always) those components will be a pair of nouns like tooth + brush = toothbrush. Word order matters – a boathouse is not the same as a houseboat.

At the Learn English Today web site the web page including compound nouns discusses several other possibilities:

An adjective and a noun (blackboard, greenhouse, redhead)

An adjective and a verb (dry-cleaning)

A verb and an adverb (drawback, takeover)

An adverb and a verb (input, outbreak).  

Words may either be placed next to each other or coupled via hyphens, like the model train engine and car shown above. Rules for hyphenation are complex. The U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual (whose 2016 edition can be downloaded here) has chapters on Compounding Rules (#6) and Compounding Examples (#7). Rule 6.7 says that:

“A hyphen is used to avoid doubling a vowel or tripling a consonant except after the short prefixes co, de, pre, pro and re, which are generally printed solid.”

Some compound words contain more than two words, as shown above by a longer model train. An article by Karina Martinez-Carter on June 10, 2013 at The Week titled 8 of our favorite ridiculously long German words mentioned Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften (legal expenses insurance companies). Decades ago I read a humorous claim that there was a single German word corresponding to the following English sentence:

“The woman who stands in a kiosk next to the opera house and sells the remaining tickets at a discount right before the performance begins.”   

Hopefully you do not have either a fear of words - which The Phobia List web page refers to as logophobia or verbophobia, or a fear of long words – which they call sesquipedalophobia or (absurdly) hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

Back on August 30, 2012 I blogged about Uncommon fears and made up hoplocynohydrophobia  to describe the fear of getting shot by a swimming dog carrying a handgun in its mouth. I just searched at Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo and found no one but me has ever used that word.