Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German word of the day.
And this time, we’ll take a look at the meaning of
dicht
Some of you immediately thought of Goethe and Shakespeare and poetry, because poets are called Dichter in German.
But dicht itself is actually about being dense.
So the big question is:
are German poets dense?
This and much more
is what we’ll explore,
so let’s commence ;)
Like many German adjectives, dicht has an English relative. Some of you probably now think of “thick” because it sounds similar. But the German brother of thick is dick which means thick as well as fat, in the sense of body weight.
- “Wir bei McDonalds sind nicht einfach ein Team, wir sind eine Familie. Wir gehen zusammen durch dick und dünn…. ”
“Sollte das nicht dick und fett sein?”
“Das ist der leise Teil, Herr Wojak. Den sagen wir nicht. “ - “We at McDonalds are not simply a team, we’re a family. Together, we go through thick and thin…”
“Shouldn’t that be thick and fat?”
“That’s the quiet part, Mr Wojak. We don’t say that.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Maria, sag mal, findest du mich dick?”
“Nein, ich finde dich ZU dick.”
“Oh” - “Maria, hey, do you think I’m fat?”
“No, I think you’re TOO fat.
“Oh.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And while it totally looks like dick and dicht should be related, they’re probably not.
The real brother of dicht in English is … drumroll… tight. Doesn’t sound as similar, but actually if you switch out the g for a c they’re already almost the same.
They both come from a fascinatingly uninteresting (and ancient) Indo-European root that was about coming, moving close together, but they each developed a different focus over time. The English tight focuses more on the force and the resulting “fixation”. Think of tight pants for instance.
This is NOT a case for dicht, but instead the German word for that is eng, which captures this notion of squeezing, that tight can have. Just think of angst, if you need a mental bridge.
- Meine Hose ist mir zu eng.
- My pants are too tight.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And for tight in the sense of holding, fixating the word of choice in German is fest.
- Halt mich fest.
- Hold me tight.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
So what about dicht? Well, dicht focused in the mere notion of closeness that comes from … well… getting close together. And that’s why it is the German word for dense and also for (physically) really close.
- Das Gebiet ist dicht besiedelt.
- The are is densely populated.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Thomas Brusthaare sind wie ein dichter Wald.
- Thomas’ chest hair are like a dense forest.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Du musst ein bisschen dichter ans Mikrophon.
- You have to go a little closer to the mic.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Steht man zu dicht vor einem Bild, sieht man es nicht.
- If you stand too close to a painting, you won’t see it.
(“nah” is also possible in this case) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And if we spin this idea a little further and get really really really really close, at some point things are so close together that nothing can pass through anymore. So it makes a lot of sense that dicht also means impermeable or leakproof.
- Der Waschmaschinenschlauch ist undicht.
- The washing machine hose is leaking. (is not “tight”)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Geez, Waschmaschinenschlauch… I was alittle undicht too, when I said this.
Anyway, so as you can see the translation of dicht depends on context, and dict.cc actually lists like 25 different options. But the core theme is this notion of “being (packed) close together“.
And with that in mind you should be able to make sense of most instances of dicht you’ll see in daily life, like fixed phrasings…
- Bist du noch ganz dicht, du Idiot?! Pass doch mal auf, wo du hinfährst.
- What is wrong with you, you idiot? Pay attention to where you’re driving.
(Lit.: “Are you still fully sealed, you idiot?!”)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das Gesundheitsamt hat das Restaurant dicht gemacht.
- The local health authority shut down/closed the restaurant.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
or prefix verbs…
- Wenn man Luft verdichtet, wird sie warm.
- If you compress air, it’ll get warm.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Die Hinweise darauf, dass Maria die Kaffeemaschine im Büro kaputt gemacht hat, verdichten sich.
- The clues that Maria broke the coffee machine in the office are solidifying/getting more numerous.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Man kann ein Loch in seiner Seele nicht mit Alkohol abdichten.
- You can’t seal a hole in the soul with alcohol.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
or of course nouns…
- Eis hat eine niedrigere Dichte als Wasser.
- Ice has a lower density than water.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Der Dichtungsring ist porös.
- The poem ring is poet.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Wait, what the… this.. uh.. this should be gasket… “The gasket is porous.”
Gee, stupid interns! Since they’re “working” from home the quality of their work went down. EVEN FURTHER!! I’m fed up, actually. If you’re reading this, Max, Laura, Justine, Dakota, Chung, Nicholas, Wolfgang, Cari, Anja, Jenny, Janusz …it’s back to office time for ya’ll! Enough work from couch, the coffee machine won’t operate itself!!
Seriously!
But since we’re at poetry now, let’s get to the question, I posed initially, has anything to do with the German.
And actually, I’m kind of curious what you think, so let’s do a little poll real quick, just for fun.
Loading ...I mean… if we think about it, a poem is usually very “closely knit”, so it would make some sense.
So are you ready for the big reveal?
The answer is that dicht and dichten are not related.
The verb dichten instead comes from the Latin dicere, which meant to say, to proclaim, making dichten is a direct relative to dictionary and dictator.
- Thomas und Maria schreiben sich Meckergedichte.
- Thomas write each other nag poems.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Rosen sind rot,
Veilchen sind blau
Dichter dichten
und kriegen die Frau. - Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
poets write poems
then we then have to learn them in school. - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Yeah, I know the translations didn’t exactly match up, but hey… poetic license, amarite. Or in German, dichterische Freiheit.
Anyways, that’s it for today, folks.
This was our little look at dicht and dick and dichten. As usual, if you want to check how much you remember, you can take the little quiz I have prepared for you.
And of course, if you have any questions or you come across another nice dicht-word or phrase just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
** vocab **
die Dichtung = the seal, the gasket (Any kind of contraption that has the puprose of sealing some gap); the poem, the poetry
die Dichte = the density
verdichten = to compress; to pile up (“sich+Acc verdichten” – for clues and hints only.)
abdichten = to seal (A leakage)
dicht machen = to shut down (For stores, colloquial)
dichthalten = to not leak (Rare in that sense); to not snitch, to keep a secret (Colloquial)
dick = thick; fat
verdicken = to thicken
die Dicke = the thickness
Dickerchen = fatty, tubby (Sounds more cute in German and less insulting. Still, don’t say it to your partner, maybe.)
Bist du noch ganz dicht? = Are you crazy?! (Often used in traffic in the sense of “What the hell are you doing?”)
das Gedicht = the poem (Also used as a great praise for food sometimes)
der Dichter = the poet (“-in” for woman)
dichterische Freiheit = poetic license
dichten = to write in rhyme, to write poetry
umdichten = to change a poem
andichten = to invent a story about someone (“jemandem etwas andichten” – always in a negative sense.)
eng = tight (Pants, races, budget etc. The core theme is a sense of being squeezed.)
Meerenge = the strait (In the context of a narrow portion of a sea or ocean)
Way late with this comment, but I wanted to mention that I read a couple of Dashiell Hammett books this year, and in one of them (The Thin Man), “tight” is used to mean “drunk” (which the main characters are for basically the entire book). That’s slang from the 1920s or ’30s, so not exactly current, but there it is.
Ah, who knows, maybe it comes back. There always is a need for new slang words for these things :).
How’d you end up here on this post, by the way? Just curiosity?
Oh, I’d just remembered learning the “super drunk” meaning of dicht from the post, then when I found it in that book, I had in the back of my head that I’d like to check the comments and see if anybody else had mentioned “tight” with that meaning. I just finally happened to remember it while checking the site today. :)
Where is the PDF button??
Sometimes, I forget to put up the pdf. Then the button won’t show.
Hervorragend, wie immer! Vielen Dank für die Gelegenheit und die Hilfe, es freut mich und ich versuche mich weiterzuentwickeln und meinen Wortschatz zu vertiefen. Dank dieses Blog kann ich besser lernen ❤️
Super, das freut mich!
“Egal wie dicht du bist, Göthe war Dichter”. What does dicht here mean? Drunk? Thx
Yup, it’s colloquially used for “drunk”. Or “really drunk” we should say.
It was a fairly popular meme-format, by the way. This play on words with adjectives.
They’re hard to get for non native speakers though.
Here’s one of the dumbest ones:
– Egal was du hast,
Bruce Willes.
No matter how kind you are, German children will always be Kinder…
Ohhhhh, true! That’s the only one that works in English, right? Do you know any others?
Ich bin leicht überrascht dass du nicht die andere Übersetzung erwähnt hast. “Dicht” im Sinne von besoffen.
“Mann, du bist richtig dicht!”
“Ja aber Goethe war Dichter!”
Vielleicht ist es eigentlich nicht so oft benutzt aber ich fand es lustig
Hab ich vergessen :). Aber ja, das Meme ist lustig.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/j3WrQH71AnTJzeHGvhU_TAb87dEIhRJHi0N5Owld-K9-xDIC_X5CUyFiYBgMwOD3IUHnj7WdR3n_ReuXym7MYXz6hDpvqU50fAjMXPs-pwdjVQ
Hello
I am not a blog guy normally but your blog sucks me in. Thank you for the good content mate.
That was my goal all along :). I wanted to make it so people feel like they’re watching Youtube. Glad to hear you’re enjoying it.
Danke für den leiwanden Artikel!
“Deine Praktikanten” haben geschrieben:
eng = tight (Pants, races, budget etc. The core theme is a sense of being squeezed.)
Meerenge = the straight (In the context of a narrow portion of a sea or ocean)
A Meerenge is a “strait”, not a straight.
You can also find yourself in finanzieller Engpässe, oder Beschränktem Finanziellen Umständen, which would be straitened circumstances.
Die Meerenge zwischen die Insel Vancouver und das Festland in Britischer Kolumbien in Kanada ist “Georgia Strait” genannt. Es gibt auch eine Zeitung die “Georgia Straight” heißt. A play on words, since “telling something straight” means “telling the truth.”
Your lessons are so witty – really enjoy learning more German with this method.
I’m glad to hear that :)
Thank you so much
Many thanks for this wonderful resource, it’s been *incredibly* helpful in learning German verbs!! Are you by any chance interested in suggestions/requests/votes for the verbs to cover in future articles? I am learning German right now and have seen a couple of incredibly common roots that just seem to be in every other book/article that I read, but they are not yet covered here. :)
Absolutely! I’m all ears. I make no promises, of course, but I want to cover all important verbs at some point.
Das Gebiet ist dicht besiedelt.
The are is densely populated.
▶should be the area
In English hair is a singular noun. So, the translation of hair incorrectly follows the German norm.
This is one of those situations where I accept that “noch” should be there, but I’m not sure I really understand it. So I was digging around in the part of my brain marked “L.A. driver” to see if the idea of “still” ever shows up in my English insults. I came up with
The part in parentheses is something you could mutter under your breath. Do you think there’s a parallel between “still” and “noch” there?
I was wondering exactly what the expression implies anyway. Is dicht here what the driver should or shouldn’t be? Both could make sense to me.
Should be “dicht”. Like… you’re not “leaking” the crazy that’s part of the human condition. But yeah, if you think of English “dense” it could totally be the other way around.
That’s what the ganz had me leaning toward – but given dicht as “blind drunk,” I wondered. Or maybe dicht in the sense of “no signals from outside are getting in” (“Hasn’t it dawned on you that you’re in traffic, you moron??”).
Well, that would make sense, but then I think you’d ask
“Bist du ganz dicht, du Idiot?”
The “noch” implies that “dicht” is the “default/normal” state.
Hello,
This one is not “dicht” with typos, only a few ;)
“I was little undicht too” (I was a little undicht too)
“And with at in mind” (And with that in mind)
And that’s it!!
Two further comments:
Where’s the quiz?
Do tell Thomas there’s a thing called laser hair removal… unless he doesn’t want to get rid of his dichten Wald…
And a challenge:
Why does abdichten mean seal? If dichten means tight and ab usually means to separate, take away, then abdichten would mean to take away the tight and that would be unseal… ?!?!? I know, it’s German… I get it… :)
Bis bald!
Fascinating. Another article where I wrote huge chunks rather quickly (as opposed to getting stuck a laboring over a sentence for an hour) and almost no typos. There’s definitely a trend there :).
I completely forgot to insert the quiz, but it’s there now.
And as for “abdichten”… yup, your logic is totally right.
However, in English it’s the same.
– cut off
– seal off
They’re both about separation, only that the second is about separation by making the separating border really not separated :).
A REALLY “nice” one is “abdecken” which can be both: “to put a cover over” and “to take cover away”.
German can’t help itself.
That’s helpful to know. Re: typos, I did note that “Starbucks” is apparently translated into German as “McDonalds”, which was a bit surprising ;-) and your funny translation of
as
I’m pretty sure was meant to be The poem ring is porous, not poet. :-)
Separating the separation from existence? Separate-ception.
I was going to say separating the problem away from yourself by fixing it. At least that’s what popped in my head when I was thinking about “seal up”, which is kind of an odd phrase because what does “up” have to do with anything.
But I think it somehow brings in the idea of done, over, away (and maybe some kind of casual-ifying factor). Like, the pipe is leaking, no big deal, I’ll just seal it up with this handy leak fixing kit and then I won’t have to worry about it anymore.
“Seal it off” comes with a strong mental image of a dividing barrier between two things or areas, for me anyway.
I think the English “logic” with seal up is probably similar to what auf- does in verbs like aufessen (“eat up”) – it’s more about completion than directionality. At least that’s the vibe I get.
Totally agreed about seal sth. off – in English, it wouldn’t be the undicht place that’s sealed off, but what’s on the other side of it. You’d maybe seal off a damaged section of pipe until its cracks/punctures can be sealed (up).
“separate-ception”… indeed :).
This notion of separation by closing is prevelant in a number of words related to shutting.
– abschließen, absperren, abgrenzen
And for “abschließen” for instance, in context of a bike it means UNLOCK (in my head anyway), because you separate the bike from the pole it was locked to, while for a door, it means to lock by key.
Actually, this is a good topic for a new episode of everyone’s favorite show: German Prefix Verbs Explained.
The visual about unlocking the bike was super helpful :)
This is a comment test
Hallo lieber Emanuel
Ich habe just/ grade deinen Artikel gelesen . Es ist einen echten wundervollen Gedichte !
Ich wünsche nicht meckern zur etymologie des Nomen Dichter . Es scheint konter-intuitiv dass es hätte nichts mit das Wort Dicht gemeinsam . Weil ein Dichter kreiert, verfasst ein verdichten ( rhythmischen oder freie ) Texte in Verse . Es ist ein besondere Dichtung dass ein Poet wie Goethe kann .
Ich wünsche dir einen schönen Tag .
Bis Bald
Naja, um den Zusammenhang zwischen “dicht” und “Dichter” zu sehen, den du gesehen hast, muss man schon kreativ sein, und Gedichte kennen und mögen :). Ich habe eine Weile überlegt, welche Parallele es geben könnte.
Great article Emanuel.
Also, I want to thank everyone who made it possible for me to read articles on here for free. I’m really excited as earlier I was only able to read a couple articles a week. When I finally arrive in Deutschland, I will make sure of paying back to the community.
Vielen Dank!!!