It tells you not to go to the gym or just skip your next class. It’s the “last song syndrome.”Īlso known as “inner pig dog,” this word is that small voice in your head that tells you to just stay at home all day and do nothing even if you have a long list of workload. It’s that moment when you’ve heard a song in the car and you keep on singing it the whole day. Its simplest translation is “world pain.” Have you ever felt so worried about the world because it is not the type of world you wish it is? This word perfectly describes that feeling. In English, it can also mean “distance pain,” “home sick,” or “longing to be away.” Germans usually say this word when they badly want to go on holiday. This word describes the desire to be someplace else. Germans use this word to describe or joke about a vertically challenged person, implying he/she is only as tall as three wheels of cheese placed on top of each other. This word translates to “three cheeses high” in English. If you find yourself binging on an 18-inch pizza because you failed an exam, you lost a friend or you’re stressed with work, you are feeding your “grief bacon.” This is the excess weight put on by someone because of emotional overeating. In fact, we’ve listed down some weird German words and their meanings for your reference. And I had said something sounding a lot like that in the middle of the café at university.Translation companies in Dubai are fascinated with weird words from different parts of the globe. My friends laughed, and after a minute of awkward laughing and people around us hearing, I was told that “einen fahren lassen” (literally: to let one drive) means to fart. Though it might not exactly fit into the scheme of “not translatable in English”, this caused an embarrassing moment when I said the word “Fahrlässigkeit” ( carelessness) incorrectly and it sounded like the above phrase. So if someone is driving around slowly when you really want them to speed up, they should damn well stop cucumbering around!īonus round here. I guess cucumbers don’t exactly travel at high speed! This word is apparently used a lot of cars. I love this word because the literal translation in English would be “to cucumber around”. suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency.”Īlso, interesting fact, the verb “koken” which I accidentally typed incorrectly into Duden just now means “to make cocaine”. *The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, as quoted by Wikitionary, is “ a cognitive bias by which a recently learned word, concept, etc. You have to admit though, playing with candles is so much fun! Image credit: - benmillet ( ) – Subject to CC 2.0 License. Weird! Anyway, this word is used when, well, you kind of carelessly play with fire, such as when you play with a candle at a table in a restaurant by burning small bits of paper or something. This was one of those Baader-Meinhof phenomena* where I learnt the word online and that evening went for drinks and somebody used it straight away. The Germans aren’t all about serious stuff like extending contracts with no limit! I imagine this word is used a lot at Oktoberfest – when people are sitting at a table, can’t really move much because it’s so crammed, so they link arms and start swaying to the music. There aren’t many situations in which you can use this verb, but, if one does arise, the Germans are ready. The employer then extends said contract without any limit. What a mouthful that is in English! This verb is used when, for example, you have a contract with your employer for a 2-year period. To extend something for an indefinite period of time In fact, back in 2017 I wrote a similar blog post consisting mainly of German nouns (with the odd exception of ‘verschlimmbessern’ which I would have otherwise put into this post).Īnyway, here are some German verbs that you, more or less, cannot directly translate into English. A lot of these are nouns and you can find websites everywhere explaining them, so I thought I’d go in a different direction with verbs (that is, ‘doing words’). Well, that part is true, but what I have noticed over the years is that German also seems to have many words that are simply not literally translatable into English without having to use loads of words to describe exactly what’s going on. You may know German as the language with really long words.