Segmentation violation

[pne]

I saw a word in German right now that I couldn’t segment properly at first—that is, I tried to split it up into components but did so wrongly.

The word was Plagiatrazzia, and at first I thought it was an Italian word segmented as plagia-trazzia, which made no sense to me (though the first bit made me think of “sideways”, but I think that’s Greek, not Italian). And I wondered why they’d put such an incomprehensible word in such a place (part of the title of a TV episode).

It took me a bit to realise that it must be Plagiat-Razzia, which made a lot more sense to me. (A raid to catch forgeries: from Plagiat “forgery” and Razzia “raid”.)

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I think helico-pter is the most counterintuitively segmented word I can think of, though they're not English morphemes, so maybe that doesn't count.

[pne]

A classical example in German of counterintuitive hyphenation (which used to be based on morphemes for words of Latin and Greek origin - I think nowadays, hyphenation by speech syllables may also be permissible) is Lin-ole-um.