Lager is the most popular kind of beer, but the word actually means warehouse in German.Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter! You’ve been speaking German if you’ve ever complained that your phone, car, or microwave oven is kaput (i.e., it’s stopped working).Perhaps hamsters wouldn’t be so popular if we were still calling them “German rats,” as we did before adopting the German word Hamster.

A hamster is a popular choice of furry pet.

What better instrument for playing a waltz?

You won’t find a much more German-sounding word than glockenspiel! Its literal meaning is set of bells.

We use the word flak to mean criticism, although in German it refers to something rather more dangerous-anti-aircraft guns!.

Ersatz is substitute in German, but we use it to refer to an artificial imitation (e.g., ersatz turf).

Delicatessen, often shortened to deli, is made up of delikat (“delicious”) and essen (“to eat”).

In English, we often use it to describe the uncertainty and pessimism associated with adolescence, hence the term teenage angst. Many of the words we use most often come from German, so today we say danke to Germany for enriching our language with the following 15 words (and hundreds more that we don’t have enough space for!). Thanks to French, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish, we can go to a cafe, sing karaoke, cause a fiasco, and then take a siesta.

English is a wonderful hotchpotch of words borrowed and adapted from other languages.

How to say german words in english