The article addresses the events to be remembered in 2017 that mark the history of German spelling. At the center of the reflection is the last issue of German Orthography, published by Dieter Nerius in 2007.
From a foreign Germanist point of view, some key points are mentioned, which make this standard work an indispensable source for the Germanic university education. Subsequently, it is shown that today the structuralist understanding of the dynamics in the field of elusive spelling of complex verbs could be supplemented by corpus linguistic analysis, which might be useful both in lexicography and in word formation theory.