Today I stumbled upon the word Imbissstand and was pretty fascinated by it having three of the same letters in a row (in this case, s) and I was wondering if there were any other German words like that.
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While there are no atomic words with three identical letters in a row, this pattern can sometimes be found in compounds. Compounds (the German word is Kompositum) are a combination of two or more words. One way to form them is by prepending a descriptive word in front of the main word (there are many other ways, they are all described here). Now, if such a compound creates a sequence of three times the same letter, the rule is to keep it that way. Note: this has been changed 1996 with the 'Rechtschreibreform'.
Some examples (from duden.de):
There are, however, some exceptions (these are not considered compounds):
Take an open source dictionary or a closed one, if you have access and it is in textform and a scripting language of your choice, like bash, and search yourself:
This leads to a lot of examples, starting with Armeeeinheit and ending in Wettturnen for my dictionary.
de_de.dict, however, gives Kleeernte and Skelettteil.
If I didn’t miss something, the official regulations specify triple letters only implicitly, because they contain no rule for collapsing them into two, except for the three “exceptions” Drittel, Mittag, dennoch in § 4 (8). Three equal letters are mentioned as a reason to use a hyphen in § 45:
Duden is more explicit in Regel 169.
As has been mentioned, this has also been possible in most classic orthographies of German in certain cases. The usual restriction was that a consonant (but not h) immediately followed the sequence, which would basically be limited to r or l after f, p or t. This old rule had been understood worse than the new one, but the reform has been met with some criticism, too: mostly for aesthetic reasons, some people would rather have all such instances of three letters replaced by just two. This would rarely yield ambiguity as in Bettuch = [ bet(en) | Bett ] + Tuch.
Still, the phenomenon is not encountered all that often, because for it to happen, a letter needs to appear twice at the end of the first part of the compound and once at the start of the second part, e.g. Geschirr + Reiniger = Geschirrreiniger. Since a final schwa e may disappear from a noun and any suffix from a verb stem, the left-hand base word does not need to end in a double letter, e.g. Pappe + Plakat = Pappplakat and dämmen + Material = Dämmmaterial.
Anyhow, the only triple letters possible in German (without place names and foreign spellings) are fff, lll, mmm, nnn, ppp, rrr, sss, ttt and aaa, eee. One could also contrive examples for ooo or ooö, e.g. Zoo + Ordnung = Zooordnung, and for the “soft” letters bbb, ddd, ggg, e.g. Ebbe + Brandung = Ebbbrandung, Kladde + Deckel = Kladddeckel, Egge/eggen + Gerät = Egggerät, but ddd in particular feels unnatural. There would also be lots of instances of ckk, tzz, chh (standing in for *kkk, *zzz, *hhh), but few people seem interested in those, although maybe it’s one reason why we don’t have kk, zz, hh in regular German graphotactics.
The most common sequence, by far, is sss. It didn’t occur at all with the older orthography, because the first two letters would always have been written as eszett ß (and are still in Litfaßsäule). It’s somewhat frequent in street signs, e.g. Schlossstraße. Common left-hand components include Schuss, Schluss, Fluss, Guss, Pass, Genuss, Nuss, Prozess; messen, essen; nass.
All cases of lll are also new, because there couldn’t be a consonant following. Most compounds are ones with still, schnell, hell, voll; fallen, rollen; Kontrolle, Müll, Ball with derivates of stilllegen making the majority.
Most cases of fff, which is about as common as lll, are compounds of Schifffahrt or Stoff, especially in (applied) chemistry (Sauerstoff, Kohlenstoff, Stickstoff, Kunststoff, Schadstoff, Baustoff, Werkstoff) and fashion. Some of them existed before, especially with frei or Flasche as second part.
Both mmm and ttt account for a relevant number of further cases. The other possibilities, nnn, ppp, rrr and eee, are rare, although found in some “common” words like Brennnessel and Schneeeule.
The only letter that may appear doubled at the start of a native German word is a, e.g. in Aal and Aas, but it doesn’t occur doubled at the end of native words, so any four-letter repetition would be an artificial construed example, e.g. *Sanaaaal ‘eel from the capital of Yemen’. That’s also why aaä impossible, while äaa might be construed, e.g. *Säaas. I suggest to make use of the optional hyphen in the rare case of aaa, others recommend it for all cases of triple vowels, or at least in nouns.
The Derewo 320000 corpus includes 457 examples (0.14% or less than 1 in 700 words), by the way. The 10 most frequent ones are:
In handwriting, many people will intuitively form ligatures for the first two letters. In digital fonts, designers should use the technology available to them to select distinct glyphs at the compound inner boundary.
For ttt and fff it’s common, for instance, to have the horizontal line cross the first two letters without interruption or to make it only appear on the right-hand side of the stem in the final letter, e.g. ⟨ﬀf⟩ or ⟨ffﬂ⟩. In aaa, one could mix open and closed variants, i.e. ⟨ɑaa⟩ or ⟨aɑɑ⟩.
Since ß is now treated like a letter and not a ligature, it’s more difficult to suggest something for sss. If the long style was still in use, it could simply be ⟨ssſ⟩. If nothing else, the inter-character kerning should be adjusted.
The German dictionary linked to by this answer can be searched with a simple regex (for example using Notepad++).
The dictionary file returned 3637 hits for the regex search
An interesting hit that hasn't been mentioned is Flussschifffahrt (double triplets in a single word), which was found with the regex
The full list is linked to on this pastebin. It is excerpted below:
Schrubbbürste… Some English-German online dictionaries have wildcard search options that you can use to find compound words with letter triplets. On dict.cc and dict.leo.org, type in, e.g.,