Dutch compound nouns: gluing words together

A compound noun (in Dutch, a samenstelling) is one noun built from two or more smaller words: tand (tooth) + arts (doctor) = de tandarts (the dentist). Where English often leaves a space (front door, birthday party), Dutch glues the parts into a single word.

Write the parts as one word, with no space and no hyphen, and put the main word last. The final part is the head — it carries the core meaning; the parts in front of it narrow that meaning down. So de keukentafel (kitchen table) is a kind of tafel (table), not a kind of keuken (kitchen).

1. Take two words that can each stand alone and stick them together: voor (front) + deur (door) = voordeur.
2. Keep the head (the meaning-bearing noun) at the end: appel + taart = appeltaart (a kind of taart, apple pie).
3. When a verb is the first part, use its stem — the verb without -en: slapen (to sleep) → slaap + kamer = slaapkamer (bedroom).

The first part is not always a noun. It can be an adjective (klein + geld = het kleingeld, small change), a preposition or adverb (achter + deur = de achterdeur, back door), or a verb stem, as above.

Give the whole compound the article and plural of its last part. Whatever comes before makes no difference: if the head is a de-word or a het-word, the compound follows it.

• Gender: de deur → de voordeur, de achterdeur; het huis → het stadhuis, het ziekenhuis (hospital). The final noun sets de or het.
• Plural: pluralise only the last part, the same way you would on its own. de deur → deuren, so voordeur → voordeuren; het huis → huizen, so stadhuis → stadhuizen.
• Any spelling change in the plural still applies to the head: taart → taarten gives appeltaart → appeltaarten, and arts → artsen gives tandarts → tandartsen.

So you never need to memorise a compound's article separately: learn the article of the final noun and the compound inherits it.

Dutch can chain three or more parts into one long word. Read it from the right: the last noun is the head, and each earlier block describes it.

• tandarts + afspraak = de tandartsafspraak (dentist appointment) — a kind of afspraak (appointment), so de.
• ziekte + kosten + verzekering = de ziektekostenverzekering (health insurance) — the head is verzekering (insurance), a de-word, so the whole word is de.

Between the parts you often see a small linking letter — the -s- in verjaardag-s-feest (birthday party), the -en- in pann-en-koek (pancake), the -er- in kind-er-boek (children's book). Which linker appears, or whether you use none, is a topic of its own: see the linking letter in compounds.

The most common error is writing a compound as two words, on the model of English. English keeps a space in apple pie and birthday party, but Dutch does not: it is appeltaart and verjaardagsfeest, one word each. Splitting them (keuken tafel, tand arts) is such a frequent slip that Dutch has a name for it, the spatiefout (space error). When two nouns form one idea, join them.