Gedankenexperiment (Jeremy Bornstein)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

"Gedankenexperiment" is a wonderful German word which means "thought experiment". The word refers to any experiment that you can perform just by thinking--also known as "introspection." For example, if you are wondering how many syllables are in the phrase "Orwellian" you can think about it and find the answer. It is actually possible to achieve interesting results in the fields of linguistics with Gedankenexperiments, because every language speaker has access to intuitions and rules about language.

The word also refers to experiments that you believe that you don't actually have to go to the trouble of performing in order to figure out what the results would be. Isn't science fun?