German nouns are declined (change form) depending on their grammatical case (their function in a sentence) and whether they are singular or plural.
German is unusual among languages using the Latin alphabet in that all nouns are always capitalized (for example, "the book" is always written as "das Buch").
Other High German languages, such as Luxembourgish, also capitalize both proper and common nouns.
Under the influence of German, the Scandinavian languages formerly capitalized their nouns; Danish retained the habit until 1948.
Noun compounds are written together with no spacing (for example, the German word for "spy satellite" is "Spionagesatellit").
Plurals are normally formed by adding -e, -en, -er (or nothing) to the noun, and sometimes a vowel is also changed (the so-called umlaut).
Sometimes these terms are extended to feminine nouns with genitive singular and nominative plural -en.
Such forms are not commonly found in modern prose texts, except in fixed expressions (such as im Stande sein: "to be able") and for certain words (e.g. (dem) Hause, Wege or Tode) which are, however, quite numerous; in these cases, omitting the -e would be similarly unusual.
In colloquial usage, moreover, singular inflection of weak masculine nouns may be limited to those ending in -e (der Name – dem Namen).
This was also done in the Danish language until 1948 and sometimes in (New) Latin, while Early Modern English showed tendencies towards noun capitalization.
As in other Germanic languages, German nouns can be compound in effectively unlimited numbers, as in Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz ('Cattle Marking and Beef Labelling Supervision Duties Delegation Law', the name of an actual law passed in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999), or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft ('Danube Steamboat Shipping Company', 1829).
In special cases, German compounds are hyphenated, as in US-Botschaft ‚US embassy‘, or 100-prozentig ‚with a 100 percent‘.
In many instances, the compound is acceptable both with and without the "s", but there are many cases where the "s" is mandatory and this cannot be deduced from grammatical rules, e.g. Hochzeitskleid = "wedding dress", Liebeslied = "love song", Abfahrtszeit = "time of departure", Arbeitsamt = "employment agency".