One of the necessary ingredients of a genuine "Sprachgefiihl" in German is the feeling for and the recognition of lengthy compound nouns and adjectives. When looking up such combinations, some of which, as Mark Twain once stated, are so long that they have a perspective, one often cannot find them even in the largest dictionaries simply because they are made up on the spur of the moment or because they figure in some technical or journalistic field. We are not concerned here with formations that simply use such accepted means of word formation as the endings -er, -ung, -heit, -ig to denote an agent, action, condition, inherent quality, but with those that represent a combining of several independent elements: nouns, adjectives, adverbs with either nouns or adjectives, and adjectives with nouns or vice versa.