List of German expressions in English


A German expression in English is a German loanword, term, phrase, or quotation incorporated into the English language. A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where a meaning or idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language. Some of the expressions are relatively common, but most are comparatively rare. In many cases the loanword has assumed a meaning substantially different from its German forebear.
English and German both are West Germanic languages, though their relationship has been obscured by the lexical influence of Old Norse and Norman French on English as well as the High German consonant shift. In recent years, however, many English words have been borrowed directly from German. Typically, English spellings of German loanwords suppress any umlauts of the original word or replace the umlaut letters with Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe, ue, respectively.
German words have been incorporated into English usage for many reasons:
As languages, English and German descend from the common ancestor language West Germanic and further back to Proto-Germanic; because of this, some English words are essentially identical to their German lexical counterparts, either in spelling or pronunciation, or both ; these are excluded from this list.
German common nouns fully adopted into English are in general not initially capitalised, and the German letter "ß" is generally changed to "ss".

German terms commonly used in English

Most of these words will be recognized by many English speakers; they are commonly used in English contexts. Some, such as wurst and pumpernickel, retain German connotations, while others, such as lager and hamburger, retain none. Not every word is recognizable outside its relevant context. A number of these expressions are used in American English, under the influence of German immigration, but not in British English.

Food and drink

German terms sometimes appear in English academic disciplines, e.g. history, psychology, philosophy, music, and the physical sciences; laypeople in a given field may or may not be familiar with a given German term.

Academia

Minerals including:

The Third Reich

Other historical periods

There are a few terms which are recognised by many English speakers but are usually only used to deliberately evoke a German context:
Some famous English quotations are translations from German. On rare occasions an author will quote the original German as a sign of erudition.