Compound Nouns

Compound nouns consisting of several concatenated nouns and adjectives are a distinguishing feature of the German language and are equivalent to noun clusters in English. Noun clusters decrease the readability and comprehensibility of the text, especially since the relationship between the constituent words is often unclear. Noun clusters can be broken apart by using hyphens and appropriate prepositions to make it clear how these words relate to each other.

Avoid Noun Clusters

The samples contained high molecular weight complement-fixing serum antibodies.

The samples contained complement-fixing serum antibodies of high molecular weight.

Exercise

Identify the noun cluster in each of the following three sentences and then rewrite each sentence by breaking the cluster apart.

1. Simian virus transformed fetal mammalian heart fibroblasts were obtained as described below.
2. Whole rat liver homogenates were used for preparing the antigen.
3. We investigated cultured rat tracheal endothelial cells.

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