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 "gemutlich" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "gemutlich" 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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Swedish, too, has a word for social coziness. As an adjective, it’s mysig; as a noun, it’s mys. Unlike German, Swedish can even make its cozy-word into a verb: mysa (basically “experience coziness”). Last of all, there’s a phrasal verb mysa till (“cozy up” in the sense of adding coziness to a place or thing).
Sounds like it could be related to “die Muse”, which is what you need to be inspired… lack of stress and so on.
It’s not related to the Greek mythical Muses, but the real etymology is surprising: the Indo-European root behind this word meant “to close the eyes or lips”. (Originally mysa meant “smile contentedly”; later it was used for the relaxed, comfortable happiness that would put a contented smile on someone’s face.)
Still, mys is one of those words whose sound and meaning match beautifully: a word for “coziness” that even feels cozy to say. When a Swedish friend blogs about their weekend and writes Myyyyyyys… I imagine them sitting there thinking “Sooooo cozy!”
Ha, now I had a hunch that this might be related to “mute” and tadah… Wiktionary confirms it. These connections are all hidden gems!
Glad to help you discover them! Most English-speaking learners pick up German before they try the Nordic languages; I learned German after the Nordics, which created a few problems you probably aren’t familiar with. (My high-school German teacher couldn’t understand why I sometimes confused bleiben and werden — a mistake that Americans typically don’t make, but Swedes and Danes might. Both languages borrowed forms of bleiben from Middle Low German; but in Scandinavia the verb ALSO gained “become” as a second meaning. The native verbs that were cognates of werden — older Danish vorde, older Swedish varda — feel like 17th-century Biblical language now. Och Gud sade: Varde ljus! “And God said: ‘Let there be light!”)
Considering the problems they can solve, the shared Germanic roots and the influence that German had on Swedish in the late Middle Ages are worth exploring.