Middle English: from Old French germain, from Latin germanus 'genuine, of the same parents'.

From Latin Germanus, used to designate related peoples of central and northern Europe, a name perhaps given by Celts to their neighbours; compare with Old Irish gair 'neighbour'.

• Überbabes and spritzers

  War inevitably influenced Germany's 20th-century contributions to our language, but German has given us many other terms, including some that handily fill in where there is no English equivalent.

  TAKE dogs, for example. The poodle is now considered to be a cute, pampered little breed of dog, but it was bred as a hunting dog to retrieve waterfowl shot by its master, and its name is from German Pudelhund ‘puddle dog’. The dachshund is often called a ‘sausage dog’ because of its long body, but it is literally a ‘badger dog’—the breed was used to dig badgers out of their setts.

  Since the 1920s we have criticized objects regarded as garish or sentimental as kitsch. At times this may be seen as a type of intellectual snobbery—in May 1961 The Times made a reference to ‘highbrows…who consider that the quality of the pure entertainment as such is generally kitsch or trash’. We might feel that this sort of thing was ersatz, or ‘artificial’, and add that it should be verboten, or ‘forbidden’.

  But there is no avoiding the language of war. Flak or ‘anti-aircraft fire’, borrowed directly from German in the 1930s, is an abbreviation of Fliegerabwehrkanone, literally ‘aviator-defence-gun’. By the 1960s it was sufficiently established in English for the extended sense ‘strong criticism’ to develop.

  In September 1940 blitz appeared in Daily Express reports of the heavy air raids made by the Luftwaffe (the German air force, a combination of ‘air’ and ‘weapon’) on London. Blitz is a shortening of blitzkrieg, which had been used the previous year to describe the German invasion of Poland. In German Blitzkrieg means ‘lightning war’. The metaphorical use ‘a sudden concerted effort to deal with something’ came up in the Guardian in 1960: ‘The women did only the bare essentials of housework during the week, with a “blitz” at weekends.’

  A spritzer is a mixture of wine and soda water named after the German word for ‘a splash’. In the 1980s this drink was certainly in tune with the zeitgeist, or ‘spirit of the time’. Since the 1990s we have used the German word for ‘over’, über, to form words expressing the idea of the ultimate form of something—supermodels are sometimes referred to as überbabes.

  German was the language used by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his Swiss collaborator Carl Jung (1875–1961), and has given us several words for feelings. Angst, vague worry about the human condition or the world in general, entered English in the 1940s. Weltanschauung, from Welt ‘world’ and Anschauung ‘perception’, means ‘individual philosophy, world view’. Until the 1890s English had no word for the regrettably familiar feeling of pleasure derived from another person's misfortune, and so imported one from Germany—schadenfreude combines ‘harm’ and ‘joy’.

  See also dude, hamster, heroin, lager, queer, trade