[kdheiwns]

Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?

Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.

[vidarh]

[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]

Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.

E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.

In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.

Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.

I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".

[1] https://ordbokene.no/bm/svart%20hull

[Skeime]

Fun fact: I looked this up in the online version of the Duden (the predominant German dictionary). It does have an entry "Black Hole" (so the English term!) but not for "schwarzes Loch", which is the normal German term for it.

(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)

[michaeld123]

Great example — I added svart hull to the article as an illustration of a language that writes it as two words but still puts it in the dictionary because the meaning isn't obvious from the parts. That's exactly the instinct English lacks.

[michaeld123]

And I attempted to add your 'svart hull' note.

[ben_w]

> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

May I introduce you to the German language?

We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).

[michaeld123]

Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.

[account42]

And we don't expect dictionaries to contain every compound word you could come up with in German either.

[Beijinger]

Boiling water is not a word. The phrase contains two words. While German has no word for "boiling water", it uses two words too, an adjective and a noun, the German language has the principle of composite words. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of German words.

"Hackernewsleser" would be a word I just made up but every German can understand. A reader of Hackernews. Obviously this makes a dictionary tricky. And it has been a big problem for spell corrections in early MS Word Software.

[RGamma]

Kochendwasser exists but is rarely used (and wouldn't need to occur in a dictionary because its meaning is obvious from its parts).

[OoooooooO]

I would write it Hackernews-Leser for better readability but both goes.

[seanhunter]

Agree. “boiling water” is such a staggeringly terrible example for TFA to have opened with.

“Honey, I’ve overheated the fondue! The problem is I can’t describe the liquid because English completely lacks any word that might be apposite in this situation other than the newly-minted ‘boiling water’.”

“It’s a problem. Maybe you could call it ‘boiling water that happens to be quite cheesy’. It’s not great, but it’s the best we can do.”

[traveler1]

Boiling point?