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List of English words of German origin
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There are a number of German terms for which there are no useful English equivalents. Because of their usefulness, these terms – called loan words – have entered the English lexicon.
This list (with nearest synonyms) includes:
- Ablaut (the alternation of sounds within a word that indicates grammatical information)
- Achtung (attention)
- Aha-Erlebnis/Aha-Effekt (autodidactic discovery)
- Angst (a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity)
- Ansatz (one of the most used German loan words in the English-speaking world of science)
- Bildungsroman (a novel regarding personal character growth)
- Blitz ("lightning", came to be known as a metaphor for "extremely fast"/a explicably fast maneuver or movement.)
- Blitzkrieg (lightning war)
- Bratwurst (sausage)
- Doppelgänger (a ghostly counterpart of a living person)
- Ersatz (being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation)
- Festschrift (a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar)
- Fraktur (a typeface style resembling blackletter)
- Gastarbeiter (guest worker)
- Gedankenexperiment (a thought experiment)
- Gegenschein (a light phenomenon in a dark night sky)
- Gemütlich (comfortable), Gemütlichkeit (cordiality, friendliness)
- Gesamtkunstwerk (comprehensive work; artwork that will be experienced with multiple senses)
- Gestalt (epiphany, a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts)
- Glockenspiel
- Götterdämmerung (literally: twilight of the gods; a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder)
- Hinterland (countryside far away from urban areas)
- Kindergarten (nursery, lit. Garden of children or Garden for children)
- Lebensraum (space required for life, growth, or activity, compare to Elbow room, Living-room')
- Leitmotiv (a dominant recurring theme tagged to a person, originally defined by Richard Wagner)
- Meister ((master/teacher, Ex. Mr.; compare to Maestro); see also the words from "Todesfuge": Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland by Paul Celan)
- Mittelschmerz (middle pain, used to refer to ovulation pain, which typically occurs somewhere in the middle of the mentrual cycle)
- Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former Eastern Bloc; Ost means East in german)
- Pretzel (Pastry of German origin, the name cames from the German word "Brezel")
- Poltergeist (a noisy usually mischievous ghost held to be responsible for unexplained noises)
- Putsch (revolution; a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government)
- Realpolitik (politics based on practical and material factors rather than on theoretical or ethical objectives)
- Rucksack (backpack)
- Sauerkraut (sour cabbage)
- Schadenfreude (enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others)
- Schnitzel (baked veal)
- Sturm und Drang (lit. "storm and urge"; turmoil)
- Über (lit. "above"; ultra, "very"), Übermensch (superman/superhuman)
- Überfremdung claim that some aspect of a culture has been too heavily penetrated by foreign influence
- Umlaut (the diacritic over the vowels "ä", "ö" and "ü", or more generally the phenomenon of vowel shifts such as the one in German that is represented by this diacritic)
- Urheimat (original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language)
- Ursprache (proto-language)
- Waldsterben (forest dieback)
- Wanderlust (strong longing for or impulse toward wandering)
- Weltanschauung (a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint)
- Weltschmerz (lit. "world-pain"; mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state)
- Wirtschaftswunder (designates the upturn experienced in the West German and Austrian economies after the Second World War)
- Wunderkind (a child prodigy)
- Zeitgeist ("spirit of the times"; actually a German calque originating from a Shakespeare translation)
See also
