On: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene

[chosenbreed37]

"Funkzellenabfrage" - That's a great word. Is there a word describing the ability of the German language to condense English phrases into a single word? :)

[piquadrat → chosenbreed37]

Bandwurmwort (https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bandwurmwort)

"tapeworm word" in English.

Basically, they are compound words.

[zimpenfish → chosenbreed37]

I think this would come under "agglutination"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination

[sshanky → zimpenfish]

One of my favorites was "Vorlesungsverzeichnis" (lecture directory/course catalog).

Vorlesung = lecture

- Lesung = a reading (like a book reading)/lesson

- add "Vor" ("before" as in "in front of [a group]") and it becomes Lecture

Verzeichnis = directory

- Zeichnis = symbol, signal, reference, sign

- add "Ver" (hard to really explain what it does) and it becomes directory, index, register, list

[pas → zimpenfish]

German is considered an inflective language, because it uses just one suffix for words, and that suffix has many-many variants to express the required grammatical meaning (singular/plural, modality, subject/object, dative/accusative, genitive, etc.)

Agglutinative languages just jam everything after the word in small morphemes. (And some, just to be sure, has a few variants of each of those, to match vowel kinds and such.)

[maweki → chosenbreed37]

The literal translation is just "radio cell query". But it's a very catchy word :D