It is an artificially compounded word, meaning exhibition of tents of the Hottentots, especially invented to drive you insane. The Dutch language itself is not, but, it turns out, can be just as tonguetwisting.

The boyfriend of Flanders Today reader Darcia De Man, for example, a Swedish national, was delighted to find an ad in a newspaper for a voorraaddoosset, a set of storage boxes. “He was amazed by the fact that one word could consist of six consecutive double letters,” she wrote. It’s a beautiful specimen, I must agree, of the tendency of Germanic languages to compound several smaller words to create one big word. Voorraad, itself an old compound, means something like stockpile; doos means box; and set, well, you get the picture.

Other notable examples include arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering, a word that we actually use in daily life: disability insurance. It comes from arbeid, labour, ongeschiktheid, unsuitability, and verzekering, insurance. But there’s also the less scary verjaardagskalender, birthday calendar, or universiteitsbibliotheek, university library.

Exactly why it is the way it is I wouldn’t be able to tell Margaret, who wrote me hoping to find out. Sometimes, there are no reasons. But I can imagine that “it is very difficult to know where to break up the word to decipher what it means”. I guess you just have to play around a bit to find out. As long as you know that rioolwaterzuiveringsinstallatie is several words in English. (Linguists are annoyed by a growing trend among Dutch speakers to not compound in writing, something they call the “English disease”.)

Another, tongue-twisting result of all this compounding is that sometimes there doesn’t seem to be an end to the flow of consonants, like in angstschreeuw, cry of fear – something you might produce when you lay your eyes on the word for the first time.

That word contains eight consecutive consonants, which is rare – but not the maximum. Hij is het slechtstschrijvend van de klas. He is the worst writer of the class. That’s nine. He or she who finds a word with more wins a prize.

Don’t forget to send me your questions, quirks, qualms, quarrels and quagmires. philip.ebels@ackroyd.be