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German Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and German is an important contributor, especially to the vocabulary of medicine and other sciences. For example, aspirin, first recorded in English in the 19th century, comes directly from German: it is a contraction of acetylierte Spirsäure "acetylated spiraeic acid," an old name for salicylic acid. Other such German émigrés are cobalt (late 17th century, from German Kobalt, a variant of Kobold "harmful goblin," from miners' belief that cobalt ore was harmful to neighboring silver ore), heroin (late 19th, from German Heroin, originally a trademark), and peptide (early 20th).
German scientific vocabulary has also used words whose ultimate ancestries lie in other lands and languages. Examples are allergy, which arrived in English in the early 20th century from German Allergie but is formed from Greek allos "other"; botulism, which came from German Botulismus "sausage poisoning," from Latin botulus "sausage"; and neuron, which came from German Neuron from a Greek word meaning "sinew, cord, nerve." Occasionally German has combined with other languages to create what might be called "international portmanteau words" combining the sound and meaning of two words. A good example is lumpenproletariat, a mix of German Lumpen, the plural of Lump "ragamuffin," and French prolétariat "the working class."
Many direct borrowings from German are easily recognizable because they have gone through little or no structural alterations in transit. These words encompass many subject categories. A few examples are, by category: psychology angst, gestalt; politics bund, realpolitik; zoology dachshund, schnauzer; literature festschrift, bildungsroman; literature and sociology Sturm und Drang; music leitmotif; mythology Götterdämmerung; food hasenpfeffer, kaffeeklatsch, pretzel, sauerbraten, sauerkraut, stollen, strudel, zwieback; education kindergarten; warfare blitzkrieg (from which we get blitz), stalag (a contraction of Stammlager "main camp"); and general terms such as ersatz, gesundheit, kitsch, schadenfreude, spiel, wunderkind, and zeitgeist. Some English words come from German place names. Among them are frankfurter, hamburger, hock, and rottweiler from Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hocheim, and Rottweil, respectively.
Some German borrowings into English have undergone structural alterations to such an extent that they no longer overtly resemble their ancestral roots. One is poodle, first recorded in English in the early 19th century, coming from German Pudel, a shortening of Pudelhund, from a Low German word pudeln "to splash in water" plus Hund "dog." A few English words are direct loan translations from German. Among them are: thing-in-itself, a translation of Ding an sich, Brown Shirt, a translation of Braunhemd, superman, from Übermensch (itself an 1883 coinage by Nietzsche and a direct borrowing into English as well), world view, a translation of Weltanschauung (also a direct borrowing into English), the expression out of sight, a translation of ausgezeichnet, and the infamous Final Solution, a translation of Endlösung. In another, rather quirky, migratory pattern, the English word boxer "fighter" transited the English Channel to Germany, there to be applied to the dog because of its wide, flattened nose, and then returned to English in the early 20th century in this new sense.
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