Germany is renowned for its unimaginably protracted and borderline unpronounceable words – writer Mark Twain once said some German words were so long, they have a perspective – so it’s doubly fitting the country’s term for ‘Withdrawal Agreement Bill’ is ‘Austrittsvertragsratifizierungsgesetz’.
The 37-letter-long tongue twister has caught the attention of a many a Twitter user, with many pointing out the irony of something seemingly so implausible to achieve it almost impossible to articulate.
Perhaps the British public will finally have learned how to say Austrittsvertragsratifizierungsgesetz by the time the UK actually leaves the European Union – when, or perhaps if, that finally comes to pass.
Other staggeringly vast entries in the German lexicon include 63-letter monstrosity Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, an amalgamated word meaning ‘beef labeling regulation and delegation of supervision law’, which was a German Word of the Year in 1999.
Another bloater is the number 7,254, as the German for it is siebentausendzweihundertvierundfUnfzig.