German words used in English, and how common they are
English has borrowed fewer words from German than from French, but the ones it took are memorable — angst, kindergarten, zeitgeist, wanderlust, schadenfreude — and English speakers tend to assume they are everyday German. We measured how often German speakers actually say them. Some are among the most common words in the language. Others are so rare in ordinary German speech that a learner could go months without hearing them.
The words, ranked by how often German speakers use them
The rank is each word's place in 156 million words of German film and television dialogue (OpenSubtitles 2018): rank 1 is the most common word in spoken German. The second rank column is where the word falls in our own list of the most common German words, which runs to 5,000 entries.
| Word | Rank in German speech | Rank in our German list | In English | In German |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| über | 116 | 125 | super-, extreme (über-cool) | over, above; about |
| Angst | 267 | 268 | existential dread | the everyday word for fear: ich habe Angst, I'm scared |
| Spiel | 538 | 531 | a sales patter | a game; a match; play |
| kaputt | 1,298 | 1,233 | broken, finished | broken |
| Lager | 1,904 | 1,756 | a type of beer | a storeroom, warehouse or camp; the beer is Lagerbier |
| verboten | 2,091 | 1,914 | forbidden, often jokingly | forbidden, in plain earnest |
| Gesundheit | 2,967 | 2,664 | said when someone sneezes | health; also said after a sneeze |
| Blitz | 4,308 | 3,752 | a sudden intense attack or campaign | lightning |
| Ersatz | 5,433 | 4,644 | a poor imitation | a replacement or substitute, with no insult implied |
| Rucksack | 5,924 | not in our 5,000 | a backpack | the same |
| Gestalt | 6,598 | not in our 5,000 | a whole greater than its parts | a shape, figure or form |
| Autobahn | 8,243 | not in our 5,000 | a German motorway | any motorway |
| Kindergarten | 8,629 | not in our 5,000 | the first year of school | a nursery school, before school starts |
| Doppelgänger | 12,613 | not in our 5,000 | a double or lookalike | the same |
| Wunderkind | 20,590 | not in our 5,000 | a young prodigy | the same |
| Hinterland | 29,714 | not in our 5,000 | the back country | the same |
| Schadenfreude | 35,856 | not in our 5,000 | pleasure at another's misfortune | the same |
| Kitsch | 37,697 | not in our 5,000 | tasteless art | the same |
| Poltergeist | 41,857 | not in our 5,000 | a noisy ghost | the same |
| Zeitgeist | 96,808 | not in our 5,000 | the spirit of the age | the same |
| Dachshund | 141,191 | not in our 5,000 | the dog breed | the dog, though Germans say Dackel |
| Wanderlust | 147,529 | not in our 5,000 | a longing to travel | the same, and rare |
Two things about how the counting works. Capitals: German writes every noun with a capital letter — Angst, Kindergarten — but the subtitle word lists are lowercased, so the counts are of the word however it was written; the table restores the capital. Compounds and endings: German builds new words by joining old ones and changes endings for case and number, and each form is counted separately. Kindergartens, Kindergärten and Kindergärtnerin are all rows of their own, so the rank above is for the exact word English borrowed and slightly understates the family.
Everyday German
3 of these words are in the thousand most common words of spoken German, and all of them are ordinary words that English narrowed down.
- Angst is not existential dread. It is the everyday word for fear: ich habe Angst is simply "I'm scared", said about a dog or an exam.
- Über is a preposition, "over", "above" or "about" — ein Film über Berlin, a film about Berlin. The English prefix über-, as in über-cool, is not how German uses it.
- Spiel is a game, a match or play. A salesman's patter is the English sense only.
Words English uses more than Germans do
At the other end, 9 of the words rank below 10,000 — known to every German speaker, and rarely said.
- Wanderlust is at rank 147,529: it barely appears in German subtitles at all. Fernweh, the word often offered as the "real" German for a longing to travel, is rare too, at rank 84,730.
- Zeitgeist is at rank 96,808, and Poltergeist at 41,857.
- Dachshund is the dog's formal name. Germans call it a Dackel (rank 31,739), and Dachshund is rarer still.
- Schadenfreude and Kitsch are real, current German words — just not ones people say often.
Meanings that moved
- Kindergarten in Germany is a nursery school for the years before school starts, not the first year of school.
- Ersatz is neutral in German: Ersatz is a replacement or substitute, and an Ersatzteil is a spare part. The sense of a poor imitation is English.
- Lager is a storeroom, a warehouse or a camp before it is a beer.
- Blitz means lightning. The sense of a sudden, intense attack came into English from Blitzkrieg, "lightning war".
- Gesundheit is simply "health", which is why it is said after a sneeze.
Why this matters for a learner
The common words are a head start: Angst, über and Spiel are in the first few hundred words of German, and you already know roughly where they belong. The rare ones are a warning. The German words English treasures are mostly the long, abstract compounds that make German famous — and they are exactly the words a learner needs least. Everyday German is built from short, frequent words, as how many words you need to speak German shows.
The 1,000 most common German words are free, in frequency order, and downloadable as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. How hard German is overall, in grammar as well as vocabulary, is in is German hard to learn. The same exercise for French is French words used in English.
Sources
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The ranks are computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.py; the word list and every meaning in it are written by hand inscripts/frequency_extras.py. - Duden: Angst, Ersatz, Kindergarten, Dackel, Lager.
- Wiktionary: blitz — English blitz is clipped from blitzkrieg, and German Blitz lacks the sense of a sudden attack.