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I thought the term was 'periphrase', but looking that up it that apparently isn't the case. I don't know how I got my terms mixed up.

By 'words made from a sentence', I mean such words as 'forget-me-not' (name of a flower), and 'hand-me-downs'.

I recall that highly synthetic languages like to do this a lot. But when I tried to look up more information about this, I can't find it because it would seem that I have forgotten the proper terminology.

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  • Synthetic languages have compounds but the examples like forget-me-not is a bit different. In synthetic languages most of the compounds still make syntactic sense and will have some derivational morpheme to make them eg a noun and thus are, if eg a noun, declined normally. In German the equivalent of forget-me-not is declined but some other Satzwörter are not. In Romance not. In Slavic languages this type of construction is avoided but if we contrive some then it will not be declined either.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Aug 28, 2018 at 17:39
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    By the way, some more examples: tiramisú, vasistas.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Aug 28, 2018 at 17:39

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I am only aware of the German term Satzwort (literally "sentence word") but I don't have an English translation of it. Examples for a Satzwort in German are Kiekindiewelt and Störenfried.

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  • Satzwort is perfect. But I see Störenfried more like robamaridos and generally en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Verb-noun_compounds_by_language, not a sentence.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Aug 28, 2018 at 17:49
  • German has verb-noun-compounds, e.g., Schreibblockade "writing block", but they are formed from the stem of the verb. The en in Stör-en-fried (<*stör den Frieden*) is a hint that Störenfired is a satzword and not a verb-noun-compund.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Aug 29, 2018 at 11:50
  • It's a different structure. Endocentric vs exocentric. Schreibblockade is a type of Blockade. But a Vergissmeinnicht is not a type of the theoretical noun nicht.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Aug 29, 2018 at 12:34
  • Well, I agree with Duden here who classify these two examples as Satzwort.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Dec 17, 2018 at 17:26

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