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 "geil" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "geil" 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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Could you expand on this one? I’m curious as to when it became definition 2 rather than simply definition 1. (Same thing happened in Englsih with sucks. I’m old enough to remember when the sexual connotatioin ruled it out from conversations with your parents. Geil is hear in German family comedy. At what point might this switch have happened.)
So the original sense apperantly was a rather broad “wild, euphoric” and the sexual meaning evolved out of the opposite sense of “boring, chaste”.
The second meaning is kind of just a second branch of the original sense, so the two current sense evolved from the same root.
“geil” is indeed tricky for foreigners to use idiomatically, but it was never a no no even when I was a kid. “Das ist geil.” is definitely colloquial, but it can sound chaste if the context is right.
Interesting! So what about Geilheit? Does it have a generic overtone, or tendency in either direction? Is it even much used, for that matter?
Oh, nice question!
This one, to me, is almost 100% sexual. I don’t want to rule out that someone uses it in a highly colloquial context for a more generic sense but I have never heard it.
One to avoid, then. Not that I can think of too many situations where I might have used it. Many thanks.
yeah, if you’re around a group that does use it, you’ll pick it up over time and if you don’t ever hear it, that means you’re not gonna native-impress anyone if you use it :).