"Funkzellenabfrage" - That's a great word. Is there a word describing the ability of the German language to condense English phrases into a single word? :)
"tapeworm word" in English.
Basically, they are compound words.
Agglutinative languages just jam everything after the word in small morphemes. (And some, just to be sure, has a few variants of each of those, to match vowel kinds and such.)
Vorlesung = lecture
- Lesung = a reading (like a book reading)/lesson
- add "Vor" ("before" as in "in front of [a group]") and it becomes Lecture
Verzeichnis = directory
- Zeichnis = symbol, signal, reference, sign
- add "Ver" (hard to really explain what it does) and it becomes directory, index, register, list