KrautBlog

Word of the Month: Index I'm reading Helen Macdonald's book Falcon , where she introduces, on the first page of the introductio...

We encountered Kummer (sorrow, grief, anxiety) already in Liebeskummer , our word of the month for December 2009. Speck is the fatty tissu...

Word of the Month: Index Nerven are nerves, and a Säge is a saw. Taken together, they refer to somebody or something that gets on your ...

Word of the Month: Index Stern means “star” and Stunde “hour.” A Sternstunde (plural Sternstunden ) is a “dramatically compressed, fate...

Word of the Month: Index Platz means "place" in a very broad sense—it can be a location, a position (like in a hierarchy), a sp...

Word of the Month: Index We know by now that a Buch is a book. Schmuck means "jewelry", both the precious stuff you possess ...

Word of the Month: Index Just in time for the beginning of the most exciting phase of the soccer year in Europe—The final stages of the ...

Word of the Month: Index I was reminded of this word when Kathleen Kiesel Cozzarelli sent me an e-mail inquiry about it, and it is a very ...

Word of the Month: Index Pleite means "bankrupt" as an adjective and "bankruptcy" as a noun. A Geier is a vulture....

Word of the Month: Index A Schimmel is a white horse, and Amt denotes, in this context, a government office. In combination, they refe...

Here's another mushroom ( Pilz ), but this one is less endearing than the Glückspilz we dealt with in the past. Spalten means "to...

A Schwein is a pig and a Hund a dog. Put the two together and you have a word designating someone who might be called a "bastard...

So far, I have resisted posting WoMs that could be viewed as sexist—I briefly alluded to this when, in a discussion about maulfaul , I was a...

Bücher is the plural of Buch (book), and a Bücherwurm is the German equivalent of the English "bookworm"—a person who has no l...

Dreck and Schmutz mean basically the same thing in German: dirt. A Spatz is a sparrow and a Fink a finch. Hitched to a word meaning ...

Unschuldslamm combines Unschuld (innocence) with Lamm (lamb). The term refers to a person claiming innocence w.r.t. some misdeed&#15....

Word of the Month: Index This compound word combines Reise (“travel, trip, journey”) and Fieber (“fever”). It denotes the excitement on...

A Salonlöwe ("lounge lion") is a socialite displaying more style than substance (all that attention paid to hair!). Eine Person...

Pechvogel combines Pech (misfortune, bad luck) with Vogel (bird). The word denotes a person who has bad luck, like a soccer player who sc...