The meaning of “mal”

Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time we will take a look at the meaning of:

mal

And just so you know, this is going to be a two parter.
I wanted to do it in one go, but there’s so much to say that it ended up too long.
So I decided to split it up.

And I want to debunk a common misconception right away.
Many sources online say that mal is merely a shortened version of einmal which means one time or once.
That is technically not wrong, but at the same time, einmal is a contraction of ein Mal, so Mal DOES exist on its own.
And also, thinking of mal as just a shortened, colloquial einmal is a bit misleading
Take this example:

• “Warst du mal in Paris?”
  “Ja, aber erst einmal“
• “Have you (ever) been to Paris?”
  “Yes, but just once.”
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Here, using einmal in the first sentence would sound super weird and using mal in the second wouldn’t work.
And that’s because einmal has a relatively strong focus on the actual number – one time.
Mal on the other hand is more general and vague and often does NOT mean “one time” but rather “a time”. Or just nothing.
Like… many mals that you find in daily conversation are more of a vibe than a word.
But we’ll get to that later.

Let’s start with a look at the origin of mal and the more “defined” uses it has.

The Origin of “mal”

I know, I know… you’re probably thinking “No time for this, I’ll skip it.” and yes, it’s not really necessary knowledge. But it is definitely interesting and surprising.

If we look for words with mal in English, we’ll get stuff like malfunction, malevolent or malbehaved. But this mal- of course has nothing to do with the German one.

English does have relatives though, and the closest one at least in terms of spelling and sound is actually… meal.
Hmmm, that seems an odd connection. But there’s more.
mal is also related to measure, meter, mellow and moon.
If you’re good mind yoga and you want to practice your skill, take a second and think if you can figure out the common theme here :)

All right, let’s see what’s going on here. The origin of the family is the embarrassingly ancient Indo European stem mē- and the core theme of this was the idea of measure. Of course they didn’t have scales and thermometers and all kinds of sensor back then, but you could still “determine” an amount, for instance by walking 10 steps.
And one of the oldest and most univeral ways of measuring was watching the moon with its phases. That’s the origin of the word moon (der Mond) and also the word month (der Monat) which has relatives in all Indo-European based languages – mese in Italian, mesyats in Russian, and so on.

Now, in the Germanic branch of the family tree, there also was a word mael or mol or something similar, and this carried the general idea of “something measured”. And it was used particularly often as a generic word for “distinct instance in time”.
The Brits had their own version of this in Old English and you can kind of see an echo of it in the word piecemeal.
English LOVED the word time though and used it more and more, and their version of mal for just one very specific fixed time… the time for eating. That’s why meal is called meal.
And that also exists in German, by the way – die Mahlzeit (the meal), das Mahl (outdated).
German just added an “h” there to make a distinction from the more generic Mal.

The Meaning of “das Mal”

Unlike in English, the old German Mal was not pushed aside. People used it in the sense of “instance in time” a lot and that’s what it still means today.

• Letztes Mal haben wir über “umgehen” gesprochen.
• Last time, we talked about umgehen.
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• Dieses Mal reden wir über mal.
• This time, we’re talking about mal.
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• Das ist das dritte Mal in diesem Jahr, dass ich mein Handy verliere.
• That is the third time this year, that I’ve lost my phone.
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• Daniel Day Lewis hat zum 237. Mal einen Oskar gewonnen.
• Daniel Day Lewis has won the Academy Award for the 237 th time.
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As you can see, Mal here is actually a noun.
So what about the small mal. Where does that come from?

“mal” as a number – einmal, zweimal, mehrmals…

Well, that evolved from the German way to say things like

• one time, two times…

Back hundreds of years, this would be phrased using a preposition:

• “Ze einemo māle”
  “zu einem Mal”

You can think of that as saying “for one time” maybe.
And over time, usage “smoothed out” this type of phrase until people started thinking phrase got washe

• “for one time”

But over time, this got “smoothed out” and eventually people started thinking of it as one word – einmal.
And the same of course for other numbers.

• Ein Zimmer in London kostet bestimmt dreimal so viel wie in Berlin.
• A room in London certainly costs three times as much as in Berlin.
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• Ich war schon achtmal in Schweden.
• I’ve been to Sweden eight times already.
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• Den Film hab’ ich bestimmt 14 Mal gesehen.
• I’ve seen the movie 14 times.
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By the way… for the higher numbers, like in the last example, there really doesn’t seem to be clear consensus as to how to spell them. So you’ll see stuff like14-mal and vierzehnmal. Oh and not to forget 14x.
And they’re all used, as you can see in this ngram (usage statistic)

Basically, before the spelling reforms we had, there was at least a clear trend, but as of now, there is no consensus.
The only thing I’m pretty certain about is that for numbers lower than 12 it is best and correct to write them as one word… so einmal, zweimal , dreimal, zehnmal.

Now, this compoun-mal does not only work with numbers, of course.
A really important word in German is manchmal, which means sometimes.

• Manchmal bin ich den ganzen Tag müde, egal wie viel ich geschlafen habe.
• Sometimes, I’m tired all day, no matter how much I slept.
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• Ich hab’ dich schon x-mal darum gebeten, dein Geschirr nicht in der Spüle stehen zu lassen.
• I have asked you numerous times not to leave your dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.
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• Einmal ist keinmal.
• Once won’t hurt.
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But most of the combinations that include a word actually have an s, at the end.

• Ich habe mehrmals probiert, dich anzurufen.
• i’ve tried calling you several times.
  
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• Turnen gucken?! Niemals!
• Watching gymnastics?! Never!
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• Warst du jemals in Paris?
• Have you ever been in Paris?
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English speakers are probably intuitively thinking “Oh, this ‘s’ has to be a plural.”
Maybe you’ve been lowkey wondering about the plural anyway for a word like dreimal. But the formal plural of das Mal is die Male and in the combination with numbers it is usually skipped.
The “s” in words like mehrmals actually comes from… Genitive. Using Genitive was the other option to use Mal way back in day…

• “eines Males”
• “of one time”
• once

And guess what… the word once is actually pretty much the same in that it’s also “one” but with the old Genitive-s. Same for twice and hence and whence. They don’t feel like a Genitive but they used to.

And in German it’s the same with words like mehrmals or vielmals. The Genitive-s got frozen in time and is still there, even though it doesn’t “feel” like a Genitive anymore.
Here are a few more examples:

• Damals hat ein Fahrschein noch 10 Cent gekostet.
• Back then, a train ticket cost 10 cent.
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• Oftmals esse ich erst am Abend.
• Oftentimes I only eat at night.
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• Danke vielmals.
• Thanks many times.
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And I think this is the perfect moment to take a break :).
Now we know, where mal comes from and that it used to be a noun first and foremost that then got fused into a few words like einmal, zweimal or manchmal.

The word einmal then got shortened to mal, and slowly but surely, mal picked up a slightly different vibe and “meaning”.
And what that is, and how Germans really use it in daily life, that’s what we’ll look at in the second part of this article.

If you want to check how much you remember so far, just take the super short quiz I have prepared for you.
And of course if you have any questions or suggestions about any of this, just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it and see you next time.

How to use “mal” – Part 2