English words from German
German gave English words for science, philosophy and food, plus a few from the 20th century that English borrowed along with the history attached to them.
- Anaheim
Anaheim was founded in 1857 by a colony of German wine-growers who bought land along the Santa Ana River. Rather than name the settlement purely in Spanish or purely in German, they split the difference: "Ana," for the river, plus the German "heim," meaning…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Cobalt
German miners kept pulling ore from the ground that looked promising but yielded nothing usable and, worse, released toxic fumes when smelted. Blaming a mischievous spirit for the sabotage, they named it after "kobold," a goblin of German folklore, and…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Dark matter
In 1933, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky measured how fast galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving and found they should have flown apart long ago unless the cluster held far more mass than its stars could account for. He called the missing material…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Doberman
The Dobermann is one of the few dog breeds that's literally named after the guy who made it. Louis Dobermann was a tax collector in 1890s Germany who moonlighted as the local dogcatcher — which gave him access to a wide pool of breeds to work with — and he…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Doppelgänger
German novelist Jean Paul coined "Doppelgänger," literally "double-goer," in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs. The word was unfamiliar enough at the time that he added a footnote explaining what he meant by it. English picked up the loanword within a few decades…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Ecology
German biologist Ernst Haeckel, an early and enthusiastic champion of Darwin's work, coined the word in an 1866 treatise by combining the Greek "oikos," meaning household, with the same "-logy" ending used across the sciences, explicitly modeling it on…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Empathy
German philosophers of the late 19th century, Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps among them, used the word "Einfühlung," literally "feeling into," to describe the way a viewer projects themselves into a painting or a landscape. In 1909, the British-born…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Ersatz
Borrowed from German, "ersatz" originally just meant "replacement," a neutral engineering term. It took on its current slightly sneering tone in English largely during World War II, when Germany's wartime shortages produced ersatz coffee, ersatz rubber, and…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Fahrenheit
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German instrument maker working in Amsterdam, published his scale in 1724 with two fixed points: zero was the coldest thing he could reliably produce, a slush of ice, water, and ammonium chloride, and 96 was the temperature of a…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Hamburger
The "hamburger" is named after Hamburg, Germany, a city with a centuries-old reputation for high-quality beef prepared as seasoned, chopped patties — "Hamburg steak." The sandwich version, tucked between two slices of bread, appears to be an American…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Lager
Lager comes from the German word for "storage" or "warehouse," describing exactly how it was made: brewed with a slow, cold-fermenting yeast and then aged for weeks or months in cool cellars and caves, especially in Bavaria, before it was ready to drink. The…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Matterhorn
The "Matterhorn" is German for "meadow peak": "Matte" is the word for an alpine pasture, and "Horn" is a peak, in this case one carved into a near-perfect pyramid by Ice Age glaciers. The meadow in question is the one at its base, the valley floor that gives…
From the Mon, Sep 28, 2026 roundup → - Neanderthal
Fossils found in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856 gave their name to Neanderthal, but the valley's own name has a layered history worth a beat of its own: it honors 17th-century pastor and hymn-writer Joachim Neumann, whose family had Grecized their surname…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - Nickel
German miners in 16th-century Saxony kept digging up a reddish ore that looked like copper but stubbornly refused to yield any. Frustrated and more than a little superstitious, they blamed a mischievous spirit and named the ore Kupfernickel — roughly "copper…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Oktoberfest
On October 12, 1810, Bavaria's Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to a public celebration on a meadow outside the city gates. The centerpiece, on October 17, was a horse race, and the…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Pretzel
The twisted, knotted "pretzel" has two competing origin stories, and nobody's fully settled the argument. One traces the name to a Latin word for a small reward, pretiola, supposedly given to children who'd memorized their prayers. The other says medieval…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Rottweiler
Roman legions crossing the Alps brought drover dogs to herd the cattle that fed the army, and some of those dogs stayed behind around the town of Rottweil in what is now southwestern Germany. The butchers of Rottweil bred their descendants to drive cattle to…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Uber
Uber's name comes straight from the German word for "above" or "over," chosen specifically to suggest something premium and superior compared to an ordinary taxi. The company's actual German-language branding has occasionally had to work around the fact that…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Uranium
German chemist Martin Klaproth named "uranium" in 1789, just eight years after astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet in 1781. Klaproth wanted to honor the freshly discovered Uranus, itself named for the ancient Greek god of the sky — a naming…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Vaseline
Robert Chesebrough, an English chemist working the Pennsylvania oil fields in the 1870s, noticed rig workers using a waxy residue that gummed up their pumps to heal cuts and burns. He patented a purified version in 1878 and named it by mashing together the…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Volkswagen
Volkswagen is simply German for "people's car," and the company was founded in 1937 under the Nazi "Strength Through Joy" program to build one. But the very first cars off the line weren't badged "Volkswagen" at all. Hitler declared they'd be called the…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup →