_Morphology

Compound

Source of the picture:
wikipedia.org

"[...] Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape -- but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere -- so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed. ..."

"Freundschaftsbeziehungen" seems to be "Friendship demonstrations," which is only a foolish and clumsy way of saying "demonstrations of friendship." "Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen" seems to be "Independencedeclarations," which is no improvement upon "Declarations of Independence," so far as I can see [...]"

"[...] I would do away with those great long compounded words; or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments. To wholly do away with them would be best, for ideas are more easily received and digested when they come one at a time than when they come in bulk. Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than with a shovel [...]."

Twain, Mark "The Awful German Language"

One of the ways in which a language may enlarge its vocabulary is by putting together two or even more already existent words in order to create new words. This phenomena so typical for the German language is commonly termed compounding.

A compound contains at least two root morphemes - or complete words - like in girlfriend or red-hot, and may include affixed forms and prepositions, as in undertaker or mother-of-pearl. The two or more words constituting a compound may either fall into the same grammatical category, e.g. web site (two nouns), or into different categories, like in online (a preposition and a noun).

Whether a compound is spelled with hyphens, with a space or no space between the words is not regulated by general rules but idiosyncratic in the English orthography.