Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "von-wegen" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "von-wegen" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Der Exorzist , sagt Carla, habe eine lustige Gemahlin gehabt, welche von Berufs wegen Maulkörbe hergestellt habe.
Okay so this clearly doesn’t look anything like the standard “von wegen!”
From the context i’d guess it’s that she made dog muzzles for a living.
So whats going on here grammatically with von and wegen please?
It reminded met of the english “by way of ”
which is pretty high register and i’m not 100% i’d be able to use it correctly.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/de/worterbuch/englisch/by-way-of
by way of career she manufactured dog-muzzles
That sentence sounds weird to me, but i think it gets my idea across.
Am i right or am i barking up the wrong tree?
Not sure whats going on with the formatting btw, its just decided its gonna be italics, whether i like it or not (shrugs emoji) ….
did you see this btw?
I did, but I forgot!! Good you followed up!
Indeed “von [A] wegen” is a fairly formal phrasing expressing that [A] is the reason/justification/position that underpins something.
It’s not one to use freely though, it only occurs in a few semi fixed expressions.
The use in your example sounds old and would be phrased without the “wegen” nowadays.
The italic is actually a bug, some em-tag isn’t closed properly in the page. I need to investigate this.
ah , cool, thanks for the great answer!