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In German, different words can combine to form longer, more descriptive compound words. Are there any German compound words that have an ambiguous meaning?

A possibility I've thought of:

If "__" is a word (e.g. "Braut"), "sch__" is a word (e.g. "Schaufel"), and "ch__" is one as well (in this case "Chaufel"), __sch__(Brautschaufel) could be interpreted as "(__s)ch__" ((Brauts)chaufel) or "__(sch__)" (Braut(schaufel)).

I couldn't come up with any examples of this kind of word in German, though.

Any help is appreciated :)

anonymous_pigeon
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    Sorry, hard to understand what you are asking. Do you think you can rearrange your question, maybe with some table style? I guess that is not what you are looking for: https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/50005/how-does-the-german-superpower-of-word-chaining-really-work ? – Shegit Brahm Aug 01 '19 at 15:13
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    This question is related, but no duplicate (because it's in German). – Arsak Aug 01 '19 at 16:00

1 Answers1

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Urinsekt

It's a shorter compound word and means prehistoric (Ur) insect (insekt). A German name for Apterygota.

However, Urin means urine and Sekt sparkling wine, so you could interpret it either

  1. Ur-insekt (correct)
  2. Urin-sekt (not so tasty)

And it even works if it's in plural

Urinsekten

since Sekten means cults or sects.

There are actually quite a lot such words (they are homographs) and I will list some more from Heinz Josef Weber's Homographen-Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1996, google books, pp. 16-17):

  • Kurtage (broker's fee) / Kur-tage (days at a health resort)
  • Glieder-satz (compound sentence) / Glied-ersatz (limb replacement)
  • Stau-becken (reservoir, artificial lake) / Staub-ecken (dust corner)
  • Wach-stube (guardroom) / Wachs-tube (collapsible tube containing wax)
The Awful Language
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