meaning: “fear-sweat” / a German word with 8 consonants in a row
The German language is notorious for the insane amount of consonants you can string together. However, there seems to be a consensus that 8 is the maximum. At least, there is no word in the semi-official German dictionary “Duden” that exceeds this limit. Angstschweiß is not the only example, albeit perhaps the most beautiful.
Some other examples include Gesichtsschleier (“face veil”), Deutschschweizer (“Person from the German speaking part of Switzerland”), and Rechtsschrift (“legal notice”).
To be quite honest, the German language is cheating a bit here. In all known examples, the second part of the word begins with a sch + l, m, n, r or w, thus benefiting from the fact that German uses a so-called “trigraph.” This is a group of 3 characters (in this case sch) that represents a single phoneme (in this case [ʃ]).
In this context, there exists only one single non-composite german word that uses 8 consonants in a row, which is Borschtsch. It refers to an eastern European beet soup that is called “Borscht” in English. Fun fact: The entire schtsch-part of the word is represented by a single character in Russian (щ) . This makes “schtsch” probably the only “heptograph” (7 characters for one phoneme) in any language.
References:
https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Die-Worter-mit-den-meisten-aufeinanderfolgenden-Konsonanten
