German Word-of-the-Day for Owlet: Day 5

buchstabieren "to spell"

This represents a lovely little collision of native German compounding and Latin-influenced derivation. The nucleus is der Buchstabe "letter". (The first element is obviously cognate with das Buch "book" while the second is a bit more puzzling. It looks curiously like der Stab "staff, rod, stick", so there's a probably a story there.) But the derivational ending is a modification of French -er (sort of this with the German infinitive ending -en stuck on it) and got its start in borrowed verbs like rasieren "to shave" and polieren "to polish". However, it proved so popular that it was soon extended to borrowings from Latin (e.g. akzeptieren) and even native elements--as in this case.

-ieren still wears its foreign origins in its unusual penultimate stress. The rare variant buchstaben does exist, takes its stress on the first syllable, and allows the prefix ge- in the past participle, i.e. gebuchstabt. But -ieren verbs do without ge-, e.g. buchstabiert, rasiert, poliert, etc. To get a combining form, just drop the -en, e.g. der Buchstabierwettbewerb "spelling bee" (something of a foreign concept in Germany, but they seem to catching on in the wake of the Rechtschreibreform).