Vocabulary / German
The German words you already know
German overlaps with English differently from the Romance languages. Rather than sharing a formal Latin layer, the two are relatives: English is a Germanic language, so the shared words are the ordinary ones - Hand, Finger, Arm, Wasser, Haus, Buch, gut, warm. On top of that sits a smaller layer of international vocabulary that both borrowed from Latin.
- Shared words
- 1,980
- Spelled identically
- 770
- Everyday vocabulary
- 18%
Where the free vocabulary comes from
English and German descend from the same ancestor, so their common vocabulary is inherited rather than borrowed. That is why the resemblance shows up in the oldest and most frequent words - body parts, family, weather, basic verbs - which is exactly the opposite of the French pattern, where the shared words are the abstract ones.
The sound changes between them are regular, and knowing a few makes many more words recognisable. German t often corresponds to English d (Tag/day, tot/dead), German z to English t (zehn/ten, Zunge/tongue), and German ch to English k (machen/make, Buch/book).
Then there is the modern layer: both languages took the same technical and scholarly words from Latin, so -tion, -ität and -ismus behave much as they do in the Romance pairs. German capitalises its nouns, which is why the list shows Nation rather than nation.
Words that are already German
770 German words are spelled exactly as they are in English and mean the same thing. Nothing to learn - just notice that they are there.
- name
- like
- sorry
- minute
- problem
- land
- team
- hand
- million
- chance
- fall
- person
- still
- start
- mark
- wow
- show
- stand
- job
- moment
- information
- live
- bank
- situation
The endings that give you whole families
256 of these pairs follow a regular ending rule. Learning one rule is worth more than learning twenty words, because it applies to words you have not met yet. Endings spelled the same in both languages are not listed - there is no rule to learn there.
| Rule | Words | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -ic / -isch | 50 | classic → klassisch, catholic → katholisch, romantic → romantisch |
| -ive / -iv | 36 | positive → positiv, positive → Positiv, negative → negativ |
| -y / -ie | 29 | family → Familie, study → Studie, energy → Energie |
| -al / -ell | 27 | special → speziell, general → generell, official → offiziell |
| -ity / -ität | 14 | university → Universität, quality → Qualität, activity → Aktivität |
| -ical / -isch | 12 | political → politisch, practical → praktisch, historical → historisch |
| -ure / -ur | 10 | figure → Figur, nature → Natur, culture → Kultur |
| -ing / -ung | 8 | planning → Planung, warning → Warnung, landing → Landung |
| -ence / -enz | 8 | difference → Differenz, conference → Konferenz, existence → Existenz |
| -ance / -anz | 8 | distance → Distanz, alliance → Allianz, instance → Instanz |
What not to assume
The inherited words have often drifted in meaning, because they have had a millennium and a half to do so. A shared origin is a memory aid, not a translation, and the German word is frequently narrower or broader than its English relative.
German has a well-populated set of false friends among exactly the words that look most obvious, and several of them are common. They are worth reading before you need them.
Recognition helps far less with German grammar than with German vocabulary. Knowing that a word exists does not tell you its gender, its plural or which case the verb wants, and those are where the actual work is.
| Looks like | In English | Actually means in German |
|---|---|---|
| kind | A type, race or category; a group of entities that have common characteristics such that they may be grouped together. | kid; child (young person) |
| german | A native or inhabitant of Germany; a person of German citizenship or nationality. | germane |
| see | To perceive or detect someone or something with the eyes, or as if by sight. | lake |
| rat | Any of the numerous members of several rodent families that usually have short limbs, a pointy snout, a long, hairless tail, and a body length greater than about 12 cm, or 5 inches | advice, counsel |
| bad | Of low quality. | bath |
| fallen | Having dropped by the force of gravity. | to fall, to drop |
| brand | A mark or scar made by burning with a hot iron, especially to mark cattle or to classify the contents of a cask. | fire, blaze (destructive occurrence) |
| dame | A matron at a school, especially Eton College. | lady (woman of good breeding and manners) |
| chef | The presiding cook in the kitchen of a large household. | boss, chief |
| hart | The meat from this animal. | hard |
| gut | The alimentary canal, especially the intestine. | good (acting in the interest of what is beneficial, ethical, or moral) |
| steven | Voice, especially when loud or strong. | stem. |
How to use this
Start with the identical and near-identical everyday words. They are frequent, concrete and immediately usable, which is not true of the Latin layer.
Learn the sound correspondences rather than the individual pairs. t/d, z/t and ch/k turn a list you have to memorise into a rule you can apply to words you have not seen.
Take the -ität, -ismus and -tion endings when you start reading anything formal. Until then the inherited vocabulary is the better investment.
All 1,980 of them
Every verified German-English pair, graded by how far the spelling has moved, with frequency and origin. Narrow it, sort it, take it away as a PDF or a spreadsheet.
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Word lists and counts on this page are generated from Wiktionary translation data with frequency from Lexique, SUBTLEX-US, DeReWo, the Russian National Corpus and wordfreq, and checked against CogNet. Nothing on this page was written by hand except the explanations.