claimed that his great-grandfather composed the surname in the 19th century, when German Jews, who had not previously used a second name, had to adopt one. In some printings of the above-noted AP wire story, himself provided the following explanation of his prodigious surname:
Dmitri Borgmann, a fellow emigrant from Germany, held that the 666-letter version of the surname was untranslatable due to its numerous grammatical and spelling errors, but offered his own paraphrase: The
New Dictionary of American Family Names translates the 35-letter form as "a descendant of Wolfeschlegelstein (one who prepared wool for manufacture on a stone), of the house of
Bergerdorf (mountain village)"; the
Fairleigh Dickinson University Names Institute gives "wolf slayer who lives in the stone house in the mountain village". ==See also==