[scrooched_moose]

It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.

In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".

When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.

[manicdee]

German is the perfect language for engineers and KSP players.

[pwdisswordfish0]

As a German I’ve always found “verschlimmbessern” very clunky and awkward, but it is pretty widespread, so you get used to it. That’s usually not the case in discussions like this, for example the famous “Wanderlust” isn’t really a thing in German, although it is a feasible, natural sounding compound.

An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).

[pnutjam]

In English, is suggest unimproved or updegraded.

[toastal]

And we anglophones can make descriptive-with-more-readability words by comparison through the use of hyphenated adjectives.

[vram22]

Off the cuff chain-associating / goal-seeking:

descriptive-with-more-readability ... Common Lisp ... Lisp ... parentheses ... angled brackets ... Angles ... Anglophones.

[vram22]

> It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.

Like Sanskrit. Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.