100 Fun Facts About German Language

What does German Gift mean, a false friend whose old 'present' sense survives only in Mitgift, meaning dowry?

Poison is what Gift means in modern German, a euphemism that grew out of the sense 'dose' of medicine in Old High German. Dutch keeps both: gift for a present, gif for poison.

Which everyday object do Germans call a Handy, a pseudo-anglicism that no native English speaker would recognise?

A mobile phone is a Handy in Germany, a word no native English speaker would use for it. Germans likewise call a projector a Beamer and a classic car an Oldtimer.

Which educator coined the word Kindergarten in 1840, a 'children's garden' that English adopted without translating it?

Friedrich Fröbel coined Kindergarten in 1840 for his play institute at Bad Blankenburg, and English simply borrowed the word. Prussia banned kindergartens in 1851 as a socialist threat, and the ban outlasted him.

Which two keys trade places on a German keyboard, one of them a letter German uses only in loanwords and names?

Y and Z swap places on German keyboards, which gives the layout its name, QWERTZ. Z is far more common in German, while Y turns up only in loanwords and names such as Meyer.

Every word of which class is capitalised in written German, a habit that Danish abolished in 1948?

Nouns are all capitalised in German, a habit now almost unique to it and its close relative Luxembourgish. English did the same for a while, into the 1700s, as the original United States Constitution shows.

Which 1963 Kennedy line in West Berlin spawned a false legend that he had called himself a jelly doughnut?

Ich bin ein Berliner was perfectly good German: Berliners call that doughnut a Pfannkuchen, and the 'jelly doughnut' story is an urban legend that only emerged two decades after the speech.

Which German act's anti-war song about balloons hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 sung in German?

Nena's '99 Luftballons' reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in its original German, stuck behind Van Halen's 'Jump'. The English '99 Red Balloons' did not chart in the US at all.

The breed name Dachshund is German for a hound bred to flush out which burrowing animal?

Badger dog is what Dachshund means, from Dachs and Hund, though Germans themselves mostly call the breed a Dackel.

Which American author's 1880 essay 'The Awful German Language' appeared as Appendix D of A Tramp Abroad?

Mark Twain mocked German's separable verbs and endless compounds, and concluded that a gifted person could learn English in thirty hours, French in thirty days and German in thirty years.

German leads the EU in native speakers; across Europe as a whole, only which language has more?

Russian is the only language with more native speakers than German in Europe. Inside the EU more adults understand English, yet German is the most common mother tongue.

German is one of three official languages in which kingdom?

Belgium's other two are Dutch and French. Its German speakers live in the east around Eupen, on land the Treaty of Versailles took from Germany and gave to Belgium after the First World War.

South Tyrol, where German is co-official and most residents speak it, is an autonomous province of which country?

Italy annexed South Tyrol after the First World War, and when Mussolini's government banned teaching in German, locals ran secret 'catacomb schools'. Today German is co-official there again.

Which African country made German official in 1984, then chose English alone at independence in 1990?

Namibia still recognises German as a national language, even though its government saw German and Afrikaans as symbols of apartheid and colonialism and picked 'neutral' English at independence.

Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish, is not Dutch at all but a variety of which regional dialect from the Rhineland?

Palatine German is the root of Pennsylvania Dutch, and the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites now make up the vast majority of its speakers, passing it on to their children.

Yiddish, the Ashkenazi language that grew out of medieval High German, is traditionally written in which alphabet?

Hebrew letters are used to write Yiddish even though its grammar and core vocabulary are Germanic; the language arose in the Holy Roman Empire and absorbed Mishnaic Hebrew and some Aramaic.

In which castle did Martin Luther, sequestered for ten months from 1521, translate the New Testament in eleven weeks?

Wartburg Castle hid Luther after the Diet of Worms: Frederick the Wise had him taken there for his safety, and he lived under the name Junker Jörg, 'Knight George', while he translated.

Luther's Bible appeared during which stage of the language, conventionally dated 1350 to 1650 following Wilhelm Scherer?

Early New High German is the stage Luther wrote in. He based his Bible on the chancery language of the Saxon court, already used well beyond Saxony, which helped his wording travel across the dialects.

Which northern variety, protected in Germany since 1999, kept 'maken' where the south shifted to machen?

Low German, or Plattdeutsch, never underwent the High German consonant shift, so like English and Dutch it keeps the old p, t and k sounds. Germany protects it under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

The Benrath line, the maken–machen isogloss of German dialects, is named after a district of which Rhine city?

Düsseldorf's southern district of Benrath is where the line crosses the Rhine, which gave it its name; from there it runs east to Frankfurt an der Oder.

The 'hoch' in Hochdeutsch, the everyday German name for the standard language, was originally a reference to what?

The southern uplands and the Alps gave Hochdeutsch its name, because the standard's sounds are largely those of the High German spoken there; 'high' was a geographic label, not a social one.

Bavarian dialects are spoken not only in Bavaria and South Tyrol but across most of which neighbouring country?

Austria is mostly Bavarian-speaking, from Vienna to Salzburg and Carinthia, which is why the group is also called Austro-Bavarian and counts some 14.5 million speakers.

Which country's Standard German replaced ß with ss during the 20th century, so that Straße is printed Strasse?

Switzerland dropped ß gradually, not by a single decree: Zürich's schools stopped teaching it in the 1930s, other cantons followed, and the newspapers gave it up one by one.

Mädchen, the German word for girl, takes which grammatical gender because of its diminutive -chen suffix?

Neuter is the gender of Mädchen, so 'a little girl' is ein kleines Mädchen, and a relative pronoun in the same sentence is das rather than die.

The loanword poltergeist pairs Geist, meaning ghost, with the German verb poltern, which means what?

To rumble or make a racket is what poltern means, so a poltergeist is a 'noisy ghost' blamed for loud bangs and objects moving by themselves.

A German who claims to 'have a pig' (Schwein haben) means what, an idiom Hungarian echoes with 'has a piglet'?

Being lucky is all Schwein haben means. The origin is uncertain, but it probably goes back to medieval contests in which the worst competitor was given a pig as a consolation prize.

A German who 'only understands train station' (nur Bahnhof verstehen) is admitting to understanding how much?

Nothing is what nur Bahnhof verstehen admits to understanding; one theory traces it to front-line soldiers for whom 'train station' meant only furlough and the trip home.

Germans 'press their thumbs' (Daumen drücken) to wish someone luck; which English-speaking gesture is the equivalent?

Crossing one's fingers is the English match for Daumen drücken, which tucks the thumb inside the other four fingers; 'Ich drücke die Daumen' is said before a friend's exam.

Kummerspeck, the German word for weight put on by emotional overeating, translates literally as what?

Grief bacon is Kummerspeck word for word, but it sounds less odd in German, where Speck is also the everyday joking word for a person's own padding of fat.

Which carmaker's 1990 US advertising campaign taught Americans the word Fahrvergnügen, meaning 'driving pleasure'?

Volkswagen's ads popularised the German word in the US with a stick figure seated as if at the wheel, yet its American sales still slid in the years that followed.

German's polite 'you', Sie, historically derives from which other pronoun, whose verb forms it still shares?

They is the pronoun behind Sie: German's formal address grew out of the third-person plural, so 'Sie kommen' can mean both 'you are coming' and 'they are coming'.

The 1996 spelling reform replaced ß with ss after which kind of vowel, turning daß into dass but leaving Straße alone?

Short vowels now take ss, so daß became dass and muß became muss, while ß stays after long vowels and diphthongs. A final -ss is the quickest sign that a text uses the reformed spelling.

Schadenfreude literally joins German words meaning what?

Harm and joy is the literal sense, Schaden plus Freude: pleasure in someone else's misfortune. In the 1850s the scholar Richard Trench called it fearful that any language had such a word; English later borrowed it.

Whose 1880 Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch became the spelling dictionary that still bears his name?

Konrad Duden was a school headmaster when he compiled it. In 1902 Germany's federal council made his spellings the official standard, and the other German-speaking countries soon followed.

Which pair began the Deutsches Wörterbuch in 1838, a German dictionary so vast that it was not finished until 1961?

The Brothers Grimm got only as far as F. Wilhelm died after writing D, and Jacob died in 1863 while working on the entry for Frucht, 'fruit'.

Which organisation, named after a writer, teaches German at cultural centres around the world?

Goethe-Institut began in 1951 as successor to the Deutsche Akademie, at first training foreign teachers of German inside Germany. Its headquarters are in Munich, not in Goethe's own Weimar.

The 63-letter Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, mourned in 2013 as Germany's lost longest word, was a state law on labelling what?

Beef labelling was its subject. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern passed the law in 1999 during the mad cow scare and repealed it in 2013, after the EU rules behind it had changed.

The 79-letter word that Guinness has listed as German's longest concerns a steamship company on which river?

Danube steamers are the root of Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, though the society it names may never have existed. The real steamship company was founded in Vienna in 1829.

Which German word did the novelist Jean Paul coin in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs, glossing it as 'people who see themselves'?

Doppelgänger began as Doppeltgänger in a footnote to Siebenkäs, a novel whose hero fakes his own death on the advice of his lookalike friend Leibgeber.

Which state-owned German company issued a 2013 glossary of 2,200 anglicisms its staff should replace with German words?

Deutsche Bahn had branded its information booths ServicePoints and its first-class waiting rooms Lounges before the 2013 directive pushed back against Denglisch.

Poland's name for Germany, Niemcy, is usually traced to a Proto-Slavic word that characterised Germans as what?

Speechless, or mute, is the root sense of němьcь: Slavs used it for outsiders whose speech they could not follow, at first for several peoples, before it settled on the Germans.

The word Deutsch descends from Old High German diutisc, a term that originally meant what?

Of the people is what diutisc meant: it marked the everyday vernacular as opposed to Latin, the language of church and learning.

The two dots of the German umlaut evolved from which mark written above the vowel in medieval manuscripts?

A small e written above the vowel, still recognisable as an e in blackletter, was the medieval way to mark the sound shift; by the late Middle Ages scribes had reduced it to two dots.

Which German loanword did Johann Gottfried Herder use in 1769 to translate the Latin genius seculi?

Zeitgeist, 'spirit of the age', appeared in Herder's Kritische Wälder, in an attack on the philologist Klotz, whose Latin phrase it rendered. The word was later tied to Hegel, who himself wrote of Volksgeist and Weltgeist.

In 1934 the Nazis purged Jewish names from the German spelling alphabet; what replaced Nathan for the letter N?

Nordpol replaced Nathan, just as Dora, Jot, Siegfried and Zeppelin replaced David, Jakob, Samuel and Zacharias; a 2022 revision of DIN 5009 dropped personal names altogether in favour of city names.

The Abrogans, kept at St Gall and regarded as the oldest surviving book in German, is what kind of text?

A Latin glossary with Old High German equivalents, the Abrogans dates from the 8th century and is named after its very first entry: the Latin word abrogans, 'humble'.

Austria's 1995 EU accession treaty protects 23 Austrian German words, such as Erdäpfel and Marillen, all terms for what?

Foods are all the protocol covers, from Erdäpfel, potatoes, to Marillen, apricots. Before the 1994 referendum Vienna's mayor had put up posters promising that 'Erdäpfelsalat bleibt Erdäpfelsalat'.

Which greeting is used at any hour of the day across northern Germany, from East Frisia to Hamburg?

Moin sounds like a clipped Morgen, but its origin is unclear: it may come instead from mooi, a Dutch and Frisian word for 'beautiful' or 'good', which would explain why it works at any hour.

German writes numbers below a million as single words; which digit, repeated six times, produces a 65-letter word?

Sieben is the longest German digit name, so 777,777 becomes siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig, 65 letters. Six sixes manage only 61.

Hunsrik, carried by Hunsrück emigrants from 1824, is a recognised heritage language in the south of which country?

Brazil closed its German schools under Getúlio Vargas's nationalization campaign, yet Hunsrik lived on in the countryside, and Rio Grande do Sul declared it part of the state's heritage in 2012.

Who, in a persistent legend, cast the single vote that stopped German becoming an official US language?

Frederick Muhlenberg cast no such vote. The legend grew from a petition to print federal laws in German: the House only voted on whether to adjourn, and that motion failed 42 to 41.

Which German word meaning 'health' do many Americans say instead of 'bless you' after a sneeze?

Gesundheit wishes the sneezer good health, exactly as Spanish speakers do with 'salud'; among English speakers the borrowing belongs to the United States and Canada.

Which weekday do Germans call Mittwoch, a medieval coinage that replaced a name honouring Wodan?

Wednesday is simply 'mid-week' in German: Mittwoch pushed out the older Wodenstag in the 10th century, while English went on naming the day after the same god.

What does the German word Blitz mean, the name Britons gave the 1940–41 bombing of their cities?

Lightning is the literal meaning: the name was clipped from Blitzkrieg, 'lightning war', the popular press's label for Germany's style of fast surprise attack.

Handschuh, the German word for a glove, literally describes the garment as which item for the hand?

Shoe is the picture: a Handschuh is a 'hand shoe', and a mitten goes one better as a Fausthandschuh, a 'fist hand shoe'.

Which US president's surname is an anglicised German name meaning 'iron hewer' or 'iron miner'?

Eisenhower began as Eisenhauer: the family left the village of Karlsbrunn for Pennsylvania in 1741, and the spelling was later anglicised.

The electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk took as their band name the ordinary German word for what?

Power plant is all Kraftwerk means in everyday German, a plain industrial word for the group that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider formed in 1970.

The German title Kaiser, which Wilhelm II bore until 1918, derives from whose name?

Julius Caesar's family name became the title of Rome's emperors, and the Holy Roman Emperors later called themselves Kaiser to present their rule as a continuation of Rome's.

Which North American animal is a Waschbär in German, a 'wash bear' named for its habit with food?

Raccoon is the animal: the German name matches Ursus lotor, 'washer bear', the scientific name Linnaeus chose when he classed it among the bears.

Rathaus, a word that startles English speakers on German street signs, names which civic building?

Town hall is the meaning, because Rat is the German for 'council' and has no link to rodents: the animal is a Ratte.

Schadenfreude, borrowed whole by English, joins Freude (joy) to the German word Schaden, meaning what?

Damage or harm is what Schaden means, so the word is literally 'harm-joy', and English borrowed it whole for want of a common single-word equivalent of its own.

Which German word means both 'please' in a request and 'you're welcome' in reply to thanks?

Bitte comes from the verb bitten, 'to ask', and it stretches further still: 'Wie bitte?' is the polite German for 'pardon?'.

German says two-digit numbers with the units before the tens; which number is vierundfünfzig?

54 is built as vier + und + fünfzig, literally 'four and fifty', the units-first pattern German keeps from einundzwanzig upward.

Wanderlust, an English word since 1902, pairs Lust (desire) with German wandern, meaning what?

To hike is the sense of wandern, making Wanderlust the 'enjoyment of hiking', a taste traced back to German Romanticism and the journeyman's years on the road.

Which season is Herbst in German, a word that shares its origin with the English 'harvest'?

Autumn was 'harvest' in English too: Old English hærfest named the season, a sense that lingers only in dialect now that autumn and fall have taken over.

Which German word means 'morning' with a capital letter and 'tomorrow' when written in lower case?

Morgen pulls double duty much as 'morrow' once did in English, where the archaic word could mean either the morning or the following day.

Which German word for fear was popularised in English by translations of Sigmund Freud?

Angst reached English through translated philosophy and psychology, and existentialists from Nietzsche to Sartre then turned it into a label for deep, unfocused dread.

In German, 'der Chef' is a false friend of the English kitchen title; whom does it actually name?

The boss is der Chef, a borrowing of the French word for 'head'; the professional in a German kitchen is simply a Koch, a cook.

German has two rival words for which day, Samstag in the south and Sonnabend in the north and east?

Saturday is literally 'Sunday eve' in the north: Sonnabend was the official name for the day in East Germany, while Samstag descends from the word Sabbath.

A German who says that something 'is sausage to me' (Das ist mir Wurst) is expressing what?

Indifference is the message: 'Das ist mir Wurst' means 'it's all the same to me', a turn of phrase that started out as student slang.

Glühbirne, the German word for a light bulb, literally names the object as a glowing what?

Pear is the shape German saw in early bulbs: Glühbirne joins glühen, 'to glow', and Birne, a word that also serves as slang for a person's head.

In a German statement such as 'Heute spiele ich Tennis', the conjugated verb must take which position?

Second place belongs to the verb whatever opens the sentence, a rule linguists call V2; in a dependent clause the verb goes to the very end instead.

In the nominative case, which German word for 'the' serves all plurals as well as feminine singular words?

The form die does both jobs, because German articles share a single set of plural forms across all three genders: die Frau, the woman, and die Kinder, the children.

A German diner saying 'Ich bekomme ein Steak' uses a false friend of 'become'; what does bekommen mean?

To get or receive is the meaning, so the diner is ordering a steak rather than turning into one; the German for 'to become' is werden.

German calls a thousand million a Milliarde; what is the false friend 'eine Billion' in American usage?

One trillion, a million million, is a German Billion, because German counts on the long scale; the British government used 'billion' the same way until 1974.

When a German arranges to meet at 'halb drei', literally 'half three', what time is meant?

2:30 is the time, because German counts the half hour toward the coming hour; a Briton who hears 'half three' the English way turns up sixty minutes late.

Schildkröte, the German word for a turtle or tortoise, literally describes the animal as a shielded what?

Toad is the unflattering comparison: Schild means 'shield' and Kröte 'toad', so a tortoise is a 'shield toad' and a sea turtle a Meeresschildkröte.

Germans nickname their quotation marks Gänsefüßchen, which means the 'little feet' of which bird?

Goose feet is how German pictures the marks, while Danish and Norwegian look at the same squiggles and see 'goose eyes'.

Which keyboard symbol have German speakers nicknamed the Klammeraffe, their word for a spider monkey?

The at sign reminded German speakers of a monkey's curling tail, which also earned it the blunter nickname Affenschwanz, 'monkey tail'.

A German who complains of 'having a tomcat' (einen Kater haben) is suffering from what?

A hangover is a Kater in German, and the cat keeps prowling: muscles that ache the day after exercise are a Muskelkater, a 'muscle hangover'.

Germans wish performers 'Hals- und Beinbruch' before a show, adding which body part to English's broken leg?

Neck comes first in the wish, literally 'neck and leg fracture', and Luftwaffe pilots are reported to have said it to one another before flying.

Which English animal name is the cognate of German 'Tier', a word that simply means 'animal'?

Deer once covered any beast in English: Old English dēor meant simply 'animal', the broad sense that German Tier has kept to this day.

Which English word for a medieval rank is the cognate of German 'Knecht', meaning a servant or farmhand?

Knight began humbly: Old English cniht meant 'boy' or 'servant', the sense German Knecht held on to while the English word climbed the social ladder.

British climbers 'abseil' down cliffs, a verb taken from German abseilen; what does the word Seil mean?

Rope is the heart of it: abseilen means 'to rope down', whereas Americans took their word for the same descent, rappel, from French.

Entschuldigung, the German for 'excuse me' or 'sorry', is built around the word Schuld, which means what?

Guilt, and also debt, is what Schuld means, so the verb entschuldigen is built as 'de-guilty' and literally asks to be cleared of blame.

The beer style lager takes its name from the everyday German word Lager, which means what?

Storeroom or warehouse is what Lager means, because the beer was traditionally stored before drinking in the same cool caves where it had fermented.

Which food do north Germans call an Apfelsine, a name that recalls its arrival in Europe from China?

Orange is the food behind the name, which reached German from Dutch appelsina by way of the northern dialects; speakers elsewhere simply say Orange.

A German accused of 'playing the offended liver sausage' (beleidigte Leberwurst spielen) is doing what?

Sulking probably earned the nickname because the liver was long held to be the seat of the emotions, a leftover of the old medical theory of the four humours.

August Horch, barred from using his surname on cars, translated the German word 'horch' into which brand?

Audi means 'listen' in the Romans' tongue, a swap suggested by a business friend's schoolboy son after a court ruled that the Horch brand belonged to the founder's former company.

Which German title for unmarried women did West Germany's interior minister ban from official use in 1972?

Fräulein had come to seem patronising, a diminutive with no male equivalent, and after the ban it largely disappeared from everyday speech as well.

Which blended word names German speech stuffed with English, a label dictionaries mark as pejorative?

Denglisch fuses Deutsch and Englisch, and the habit it mocks runs deep: English has even borrowed the word back, as Denglish, since 1996.

Ohrwurm, the German word for a catchy tune stuck in the head, is also the everyday name of which real insect?

Earwig and catchy tune share a single word in German: Ohrwurm is literally 'ear worm', and English translated the two parts but kept only the musical sense.

The word 'dollar' descends from which German coin name, first given to silver minted in 16th-century Bohemia?

Thaler is short for Joachimsthaler, a coin first minted in the town of Joachimsthal; English had the word as 'daler' by 1550 and as 'dollar' by about 1600.

Finland's name for Germany, Saksa, and Estonia's Saksamaa both recall which Germanic tribe?

Saxons were the Germans whom the Finns encountered first, and the name stuck, in the same way that the French met the Alamanni and still say Allemagne.

Schmetterling, the German for butterfly, is traced to Schmetten, a dialect word for which dairy product?

Cream was what folk belief accused the insects of stealing: witches were said to turn themselves into butterflies to raid the dairy, a notion the English name seems to echo.

Bastian Sick's bestselling books on German usage joke in their title that the dative is the death of which case?

Genitive endings are the casualty in the title, which Sick gave to fifty of his 'Zwiebelfisch' columns; the collection sold more than two million copies within two years.

Germans call anything run-of-the-mill 'null-acht-fünfzehn' (08/15), after a First World War model of what?

Machine gun 08/15 was a lightened version of the army's standard MG 08; its designation passed from soldiers' slang into everyday German, where it now labels anything totally ordinary.

Theodor Siebs's 1898 pronouncing dictionary set the standard for spoken German as it should sound where?

On the stage is where German first got one agreed pronunciation: Siebs's Deutsche Bühnenaussprache laid down unified rules for actors across the German-speaking theatre.

Which epic poem, written around 1200 in Middle High German, tells of the dragon-slayer Siegfried and his murder?

Nibelungenlied means 'Song of the Nibelungs'; the poem was forgotten after about 1500, rediscovered in 1755 and later made Siegfried a figurehead of German nationalism.

A German student who builds an Eselsbrücke, literally a 'donkey's bridge', has made which of these?

A mnemonic is a 'donkey's bridge' in German, a word-for-word translation of the scholars' old phrase pons asinorum, the 'bridge of asses'.

Torschlusspanik, the German fear that time to act is running out, first pictured the nightly closing of what?

City gates were shut at nightfall for safety, so latecomers faced a dangerous night outside the walls; the word is literally 'gate-shut panic'.