German loan words in English

English has been steadily adopting words from German for several centuries. Here are a few: the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

We have all heard of the über-cool word doppelganger. In German, der Doppelgänger combines doppel (double) with Gänger, from gehen (to go).

Most of us have been to kindergarten, mused over the meaning of zeitgeist, seen the film Poltergeist and heard of leitmotiv and angst: all borrowed from German.

Anyone living in Middlesex, Essex or Sussex may wonder where these place names come from. They mean the Middle Saxons, the East Saxons and the South Saxons: Saxons settled in England during the fifth and sixth centuries and liked to give places familiar names.

Arriving late for work because the railways are kaput? Today, broken railways are not the fault of Germany’s Blitzkrieg. The word kaput is German (kaputt), as is Blitzkrieg: der Blitz (lightning) + der Krieg (war).

Are you wallowing in Schadenfreude when your colleague draws flak from the boss because he is late for work again? There we have two more words borrowed from German. Flak is an abbreviation of Flugabwehrkanone (air defence cannon). Schadenfreude combines Schaden (harm or damage) and Freude (joy): the pleasure one takes in the misfortune of others.

We’ve all eaten Apfelstrudel, measured the temperature in Fahrenheit, driven cars with diesel engines and eaten frankfurters and hamburgers: all German.

Tokio Hotel, Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten are German bands. Motörhead, however, is an English band that has borrowed, or shall I say stolen, the umlaut from German.

Words you already know

You probably know more German than you think. Our two languages are closely related, both being West Germanic, so many words are almost identical, if not in spelling then in pronunciation. Hand and Finger are the same in German, and Fisch and Maus sound exactly like fish and mouse.

Same word, different meaning

Some German loan words keep their meaning in English, such as hamburger. Many don’t:

Loan word	Meaning in German	Meaning in English
die Angst	any fear	a feeling of anxiety, apprehension or insecurity
der Dachshund	the official breed name; in everyday German the dog is a Dackel	the breed itself, also known as the sausage dog
Kitsch	tacky, gaudy art or trinkets, or art that is pretentious or overly sentimental	much the same, though kitsch is often collected knowingly and enjoyed for its kitschiness
über-	over or above, as in Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the “over-man”	a loose intensifier: an übercar, or even “uber lame”
kaputt	broken	utterly finished or destroyed, unable to function, hopelessly outmoded

And the other way round

It’s not one-way traffic. Many English words have seeped into German too, in a combination popularly known as Denglisch, though the phenomenon is far from popular with language purists. Nowhere is it more prevalent than in business and technology, with nouns like der Workshop, das Meeting and der Job, and the widespread verbs managen and downloaden. Despite there being perfectly serviceable German words for all of these, they’re not seen as cool, and people quip that Deutsch ist out.

You’ll notice that even when nouns are borrowed from English, they must still be capitalised in written German. Perhaps the spread of English words cannot be halted, but grammatical standards must be preserved!