alt Hacker Newsbut can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary.
Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"
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Wobbles42 • last Monday at 7:17 PM
More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?
Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?
It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.
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not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".