Is "weiterverlaufen" a German word?

Question

While reading Der Anschlag, by Stephen King, translated by Wulf Bergner, I ran across this sentence:

Ich stellte mir vor, dass der Kanal, den ich gesehen hatte, direkt unter diesem eigenartig tief liegenden Innenstadtbereich weiterverlief.

But neither DWDS nor Duden give any definition of weiterverlaufen. Yet when one looks for the use of this word in DWDS many examples are found, although, oddly, mostly limited to the Wikipedia and the Bundestagskorpus. Is this a German word or not, and if it is, how does it come to be a valid German word without being found in DWDS or Duden?

Answer 1

It is a matter of interpretation whether separable verbs are two words or one. Viewed in one direction, this means that they often form a unit of meaning but can nevertheless be broken up in the syntax of the clause. Conversely, a verb with an addition that is very close can be viewed as "one word" to some extent if you want. It's not so clear what you mean with "word" in the context of particle verbs, after all.

This ambiguity between one or two words arises especially with additions to a verb that denote a result or a direction (the two seem to form a unified category to some extent), or which specify how the event unfolds through time (aktionsart), e.g. "los" (to start), or "weiter" in the temporal, instead of spatial, sense (to continue).

From that perspective, the reason why something like "weiterverlaufen" is not listed in dictionaries could be that it is too regular. The same thing as with compounds. The contribution of aktionsart markers or result or direction is indeed more predictable than that of the particles that go back to locative prepositions ("an-, auf-" etc).

For another thing, the spelling as one written word is often meant to reflect intonation, i.e. the absence of a new stress on the base verb. I would usually say "WEIterverlaufen" instead of "WEIter verLAUfen". But that's now "one word" in the sense of intonation, and this is a third category besides a unit of meaning or a unit of syntax. So all in all, "word" is an ambiguous thing that exists at different levels of grammar, and the different kinds of division do not always coincide.

Answer 2

Oddly enough Duden has weiterverkaufen but not weiterverlaufen.

But I can assure you weiterverlaufen is built after the same principle and thus, a valid verb. Sometimes dictionaries want to push the separated forms e.g. weiter verlaufen but this is just random and odd. The 1996 spelling reform introduced a lot of that nonsense which had been taken back in large parts only a few years later.

Weiterverkaufen is actually a prime example for why it's nonsense:

• weiter verkaufen — to continue with selling
• weiterverkaufen — to sell what you bought

There are tons of such verbs where separated or not makes a difference. So you have to put the non-separated form into the dictionary.

I can do the same with weiterverlaufen:

• weiter verlaufen — to continue with blending
• weiterverlaufen — to run further

See how random this is?

Answer 3

"weiter" is very much a productive prefix, i.e. can be added to existing verbs and nouns even if the resulting combination cannot be found in dictionaries. Dictionaries' choices which combinations with "weiter" to include and which not are relatively arbitrary and can probably only be explained by whoever makes those dictionaries.

Ich kann diese Antwort jetzt weitertippen, und morgen ist Sonntag, das heißt, wenn ich um 7:00 aufwache, kann ich weiterschlafen. Vor einigen Stunden habe ich kurz den Fernseher eingeschaltet und bin dann draufgekommen, dass ich die Sendung doch uninteressant finde und sie nicht weitersehen möchte. Vor einigen Minuten habe ich mein Smartphone an eine Steckdose gesteckt, daher bin ich mir sicher, bis es vollständig geladen ist, wird es noch weiterladen müssen.

Genau so kann ein Fluss, eine Straße, sonst ein Verkehrsweg nach einer bestimmten Stelle irgendwohin anders weiterverlaufen, dann ermöglicht er vielleicht die Weiterfahrt an diesen Ort.

Ich könnte jetzt noch weiterschreiben, aber ich denke, du hast das Konzept verstanden.

Answer 4

Yes, it is.

Let's see:

• Does the word consist of parts that are spelled correctly according to German orthography?
  Yes ✅
• Are those parts correctly joined together to form a word using the rules for building compound German words?
  Yes ✅
• Is the word used in a grammatically correct German sentence?
  Yes ✅
• Does the sentence containing the word have a meaning that is understood by the majority of German native speakers?
  Yes ✅
• Does the word contribute to that meaning?
  Yes ✅

I think these are criteria enough to prove that this word is an absolutely valid German word.

Just because you can't find a word in a dictionary doesn't mean it doesn't exist. German compound words are a layer between atomic words (words that are not compounds) and sentences. There are rules for creating such compounds from atomic words and other shorter compounds, and using these rules you can create millions, maybe billions, of valid German words. Putting them all in a dictionary makes almost as little sense as putting every possible correct sentence in a dictionary. You can never reach the point where you can say that all possible compound words are now collected in a dictionary. So there will always be German compound words that are created by native speakers without being in any dictionary. And they are still absolutely valid and correct German words.

Here is another example:

The word Windelbox does not exist in these dictionaries at the time this answer was written:

• Wiktionary
• Duden
• DWDS
• The free dictionary
• OWID
• Uni Leibzig

But still you can buy it from Amazon.