Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German word of the Day. This time with a look at the meaning of
streckn
Oh… sorry… I had something stuck in my throat.
So yeah, today we’ll look at
strecken
Wow, they almost sound the same. How funny.
Seriously though, I’m sure many of you have come across strecken in one form or another, but chances are also that you never really spent much time looking into the family.
And that’s exactly what we’ll do today, because there are some nice words to be found. And we’ll also look at the difference between strecken and dehnen, which … uh… you probably never wondered about. But hey, it’s a thing now :)
So… let’s jump in.
***
Strecken is the German cousin of to stretch and the origin of them is the farcically ancient Indo-European root *(s)tere-.
That’s also the origin of words like stark, string, strong and strength the core idea of it was something along the lines of:
tight, stiff, narrow
Just think of a big rubber band that you extend… that gets more narrow, but it also gets stiffer, more rigid. And it gets longer.
Some words of the family, like the German stark and its translation strong, focused on the stiffness and eventually shifted toward the idea of strength.
Other words, like string, focused more about the “narrowness”.
And strecken and stretch… well those are kind of about the “act” of extending. Like, just think of doing some stretching. You “extend” your muscles, they get more string-like while you do that and they get also more stuff.
However, there’s a small but important difference between strecken and to stretch, and strecken is NOT the best word for sport stretching. Because that is dehnen.
The difference between “dehnen” and “strecken”
Both dehnen and strecken can be a translation for to stretch. But for the stretching that we do after sports or when we’re doing yoga, dehnen is the more common and better choice.
- Ich dehne mich jeden morgen.
- I do stretching every morning.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- 11 Gründe, warum man sich regelmäßig dehnen sollte.
- 11 reasons why you should stretch regularly.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich habe meine Waden nach dem Joggen nicht gedehnt.
- I didn’t stretch my calves after running.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Wenn ihr keine Dehnung in den Waden spürt, dann macht ihr die Übung falsch.
- If you don’t feel a stretch in the calves, you’re doing the exercise wrong.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Using strecken in these is not really wrong. But it makes it sound more like a quick one-off motion where you just “extend” your body. Like, what we do when we wake up during a mic-off, no camera zoom meeting
- Thomas wacht auf, gähnt, streckt sich und checkt den Chat.
- Thomas wakes up, yawns, stretches his limbs and checks the chat.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
If your stretching is focused on putting the muscles and tendons under tension, then dehnen is the better word. Which makes sense, because dehnen and tension and tendons are related. That’s actually quite a crazy family with words like thin, tent, tense, tennis, pretend, contain and many more. But we can look at it another time.
So yeah… dehnen is about the idea of tension…. “dehn-sion” if you will :).
Strecken on the other hand is more about the theme of extending, making longer.
The actual meaning of “strecken”
Now you might be like:
“Wait, Emanuel, you said strecken comes from a family that was about stiff, tight and is related to strong…. how is it now about extending all of a sudden?”
Which is a great question!
Find out more
All lessons, tools and premium features (and there’s a LOT of them :).
Already a member?
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
We use the word “stretch” also in English for a distance, for example: The stretch of highway between Las Vegas and LA is very lonely.
Vielen Dank. Deine Erklärungen und Beispiele kommen echt gut rüber, Lieber Emanuel. Der Stoff macht mir Spaß und ich begreife, worum es geht. Deine Hilfe ist einfach unbezahlbar.
“kommen echt gut rüber”… wow, sehr idiomatisch :)
Does not open even though I have not read posts for months. Thx
Did you come from the newsletter directly?
Very rarely do we get a chance to correct your English, E, but it should be ‘the llama stuck its tongue out AT me…’
Ah, danke :).
Learning these combinations is a journey that never ends, truly.
Wait, what did you have originally? “To”?
“To” just sounds friendlier XD
Yeah, I had “to”. But I think in this context, “at” is the right one :). Llama is being cocky.
In all the literature I’ve read, “recken” is used when someone stretches her limbs. I’ve never seen “dehnen” used that way. Possibly “recken” is related with “strecken”
Nice one!
“recken” is related to “gerade” and “ragen” and it’s about “making straight”.
You’re right – in novels it’s quite common for someone stretching out, but I don’t think I have ever used that in daily life.
Hey there, was wondering which verb or (verbal ) noun might be used in translation of the English notion of a “stretch” as in a “reach” (when someone would like to make a relation between two ideas but it seems a bit tenuous or far-fetched ).
P.S. I just began my subscription as a sponsor and wanted to say a big thanks to anyone who contributes to this lovely website with a promise to make good use of your donation!
I think “weit hergeholt” might be what you’re seeking here (but using me as a source is “definitiv ein wenig weit hergeholt”, so confirmations and/or refutations all warmly welcomed :-) ) The expression has the lovely bonus of being a pretty literal translation of “far-fetched”.
Zum Beispiel…
Meiner Meinung nach ist die Schlussfolgerung ziemlich weit hergeholt. (In my opinion the conclusion is somewhat far-fetched.)
Exactly!!
I forgot to reply to that comment, but that would be my reply as well!
In English, we make the distinction between a “route” and a “stretch”.
For instance, in English the following means the entire trip is from Oslo to Bergen:
While the following refers to only the segment between Oslo and Bergen within a longer route:
Do both translate in German to:
Or is there a way to distinguish between a specific stretch and the full route?
You could use “der Abschnitt” if you really want to drive home that it’s just a part, but “Strecke” would work, too here, as its long enough and has two very clearly defined end points.
First of all, I would like to thank you and the YourDailyGerman community for sponsoring me a year of membership. I’m very lucky to access to this material and it will help me tons during my universitarian studies of German Philology.
Talking about the entry, wonderful explanation on the difference between meanings and the many variants. I wanted to know, though, if “auf der Strecke bleiben” can also be used with people, and not just values or objects. I also had some doubts with “streckenweise”. Can it be used to talk about “some parts” as in space, and not just time or aspects? E.g. In some parts of the mountain visitors can encounter wild pumas.
Good question!
I would say it always has a time component to it, so you could use it for a train ride where stretches are boring, because that still involves the time you spend riding along the boring stretches.
But you can NOT use it for a room that has boring parts.
Thanks a lot.
Schon gestern dachte ich die Verbindung zwischen die Wörter „die Strecke” und „strecken”. Vielen Dank!!
VERY well put together. Thanks. Another related English word (becoming obsolete) is “strait” – as in straitjacket, Straits of Magellan, meaning narrow.
(“Police” is plural, like “sheep” but not “water”, so they take the plural form of a verb.)
Oh, nice one.
Oh yes, Dire Straits.
“lying on” the couch.
I thought “borgen” meant to borrow?
Also, the verb “to lay” in English is transitive – it has to have an object, e.g. the chicken is laying an egg.
to lay – ( imperfect ) laid – (past participle) laid
to lie – I.e. be recumbent – is what you meant. It is intransitive & goes: to lie – (imperfect) lay – (past participle) laid/lain
Then of course there is the verb – to lie, I.e. to tell an untruth. Thus:
to lie – (imperfect) lied – (past participle) lied.
Thanks for “strecken ” – very helpful!
Mary, you are spot-on … for British English.
Alas, North Americans have simplified it. We talk about “The lay of the land”, or “When I am laying in bed I can hear it”, or “Lay down this instant, you naughty boy!”.
Or maybe it’s from the old English reflexive form? A prayer from 1600 AD starts “Now I lay me down to sleep …”
I think the picture is a bit more complicated and probably depends on your region. My AE is fairly neutral, and I absolutely do distinguish between lie – lay – lain and lay – laid – laid.
I note that Mary has both lain and laid as possible past participle forms for lie – I think that’s the biggest contributor to lie and lay being used interchangeably, wherever that happens. The participle forms get mixed up, and that works its way back to the other forms. (To me, only lain is correct p.p. for lie.)
But I do think the semi-obsolete reflexive lay thing you mention is at work, at least in some dialects. In the area of West Virginia where I went to high school, set was overwhelmingly preferred over sit – “Set down!” Maybe that was just a pronunciation thing, but my feeling was that there was probably a “you” that dropped out of “Set you down” at some point. One can imagine that happening even more quickly and easily with lay.
borgen, leihen, ausborgen, ausleihen … they are all about borrowing, lending.
Vorstrecken is just another option, less common and only for money and only in a context where you pay for someone and then they pay you back. So you don’t just give them money.
For vorstrecken, how formal or casual does that sound?
I think “to spot someone [something]” fits that pretty perfectly.
It doesn’t sound too formal… more like “formal through lack of usage”.
But it’s a bit too official sounding for the context you suggested. I’d only use it for more substantial sums.
you can also do a “kurzstrecke” in a taxi in Berlin apparently, never tried it myself though
Ah, I know that from back in the day as “Winketarif”, where you can go no more than two kilometers or so.
I’ve never been much of a taxi person, also because it is expensive, but recently I have been using Bolt, if I needed a ride late at night. They offer crazy discounts and I have decided to milk silicon valley VC investors for as long as I can and let them subsidize my life. Driver gets a hefty tip, so everyone profits (except VCs).
Milking VCs is a privilege not many people get, so it would be a shame to waste it.
lol. yeah do it! Did you ever use a Berlkönig?A collegue of mine was really into them for a while…
No, I think I never used it.
Is that still a thing?
I am using Jelbi quite a bit now, for e Scooters and normal bikes.
It’s nice to have all the options in one place without having to download like 10 apps.
Is it a thing still? Good question…
That example with the movie, for some reason it reads in my mind as:
The movie was somewhat good, but “lengthwise” a bit boring.
It’d carry the same meaning like that.
Wow, “lengthwise”? Really?
Yeah, in the end it refers to “unnecessary” segments in the movie.
Wow, I’ve never heard that word, I think. Would that also work for a long scenic train ride that “streckenweise” has a bit too many tunnels?
No, because this “lengthwise” is like “length-mäßig” or “was die Länge angeht.”
Meaning it was good, but when you think about the whole length, it was too long. Whereas “streckenweise” is like sections of it were boring.
Maybe you’ve heard this kind of “wise” before. You can do a lot with it.
FWIW, “lengthwise” really, really sounds to me like it’s referring to position or direction:
I’d almost be inclined to hyphenate if you mean “in terms of length” for a movie: “length-wise.”
Yeah. It took me a minute to remember the other kind of lengthwise. I would use a hyphen too, but I tend to be lazy.
It’s really colloquial for sure. I wonder if maybe it’s a somewhat newer thing too. The Google results for this meaning (and other stuff like “friend-wise”) seemed to be from, say, the 2010s and on for the most part.
Same here, and even hyphenated, something like “length-wise a bit boring” makes no sense to me. And generally I’m a fan of the -wise thing. Emanuel, does this ever work in German, ending things with -weise in the way people are using -wise here?
We do have “-weise”, but I’d not recommend getting creative with it and making up new words, because it probably won’t be idiomatic.
The better options are “-mäßig” and “von … her”.
Do you see a difference between “gesangsmäßig” and “gesangstechnisch” in these examples:
They seem similar, but I’m not sure if they’re interchangeable. Or if one sounds better or worse than the other.
“-mäßig” sounds more colloquial, at least in contexts where actual technique is part of it, like for singing.
I could see “gesangstechnisch” in written critique, while “gesangsmäßig” would sound too slangy for that.
But both are not exactly the pinnacle of class.
Oh, yes, I know this -wise, but I would have understood “lengthwise” as “as far as length is concerned” and not as “parts of the whole stretch”. That had me wondering.
Right. I don’t think English has a one-word equivalent for “streckenweise.” At least I can’t think of a good one. In parts, in places, some parts, here and there. Other options depending on context. Lengthwise is not one of them.
I may be a bit behind the times, but I have never heard “lengthwise” used that way. (The movie was somewhat good, but “lengthwise” a bit boring.) It would have taken me a few beats to realize what the person meant. Maybe it’s a new regional thing? I would have used “over all.”
“Stretch” has a wide range of uses in English, some of which would apply to your commentary. For example, a designated portion of a road would be called a stretch of road. “This stretch of road is very boring.” Stretch can also refer to time as well as a thing that takes time. “A stretch of that movie was too violent to watch.” “He had to do a stretch in prison.” There was a stretch in the concert when the band was totally out of tune.” Also, unrelated to any examples you used for strecken the English use of stretch can be as a figurative extension, especially an overextension. When, for example, a person fails to sufficiently substantiate an argument or point of view one could say, “Well that was a stretch.” This suggests that what was said was not sufficient or believable. Similarly, if you set an unrealistic goal for yourself someone might advise you that your goal looks to be a bit of a stretch. Oh yes, I almost forgot, in the corporate world they love for people to make “stretch goals” In other words, unrealistic goals to everyone but your manager.
Most of these unfortunately will NOT translate to Strecke even though the underlying themes are the same :).
Hallo,
Let’s strecken this comment by correcting some typos:
“But it makes it sounds” (But it makes it sound)
“sleepwalked” – one word
“It’s the related words that really matters here” (It’s the related words that really matter here)
And yes, buses don’t fly, but one of our friends has already pointed it out.
I’ve often exercised to a German video where the woman goes “beugen, strecken, beugen, strecken…. beeeeeeuuuugen, streeeeecken” – a quick stretch, which is why it’s not dehnen – sehr lustig!
Bis bald!
Haha, schönes Beispiel :).
The focus here is on “bending” and then “extending, making straight”, not so much on flexing/stretching the muscle.
I think sports videos like this are a nice way to pick up some vocab, actually, because they’re soooo repetitive and you’re physically active, which helps “retention”.
three thoughts this morning
First, another outstanding post. I learn so much from these focused presentations of one or two words. The pronunciation practice is helpful, too. Makes you slow down and pronounce everything.
Second, and I’m surprised Elsa or someone like that has not yet pointed this out, not even in Germany or Bulgaria do buses fly. Yet. Unless you’re in an Airbus, I suppose.
Third, and most importantly, I think you sometimes don’t realise how much benefit we get from the very casual sayings: so…
Ich strecke mich nach der Keksdose, aber ich komme nicht ran.
I can easily read / listen to news on Deutsche Welle or read German novels. But to say this idiomatically as you’ve written it would be a big challenge–so thank you!
Thanks so much for a wonderful blog!!
Thanks a lot for the great feedback!
And I think you’ll like the (web)app we’ll soon build for the prefix verbs because that’ll be full of examples like this, all just two finger tips away :)
Yes, this, 1000x this! I’ve been learning German for years and it’s only in this blog that I come across phrases like “ich komme nicht ran.”
Same here. Thank you Emanuel and all the people giving a little more for their paid membership. I have some details on my profile.
Übrigens, I found this excellent blog from ChatGPT!!!
Oh nice, I’m glad to hear that :).
Make sure to check out my ChatGPT tools here, too.
Thank you alot for Emanuel and the german learning community for sponsoring me and giving me the opportunity to learn german better with this amazing blog:)
“strecken” hat für mich eine schwierige Aussprache. Ich weiß nicht warum. Meine Zunge bricht. Ich muss viel üben.
Ja, das kann ich mir vorstellen, dass “strecken” nicht einfach ist :)
Für mich auch. Ich habe bemerkt, dass es hilft, wenn ich auf “str” als einen Aussprachenteil statt “st” + “r” fokussiere.
Wie machst du das denn?