die Notwehr
Meanings
Examples
My Articles
We’ll look at the family of die Not and find lots of necessary words - literally :).
Vocab:
die Not, notwendig, nötig, benötigen, der Notfall

A fun look at the meaning of "wehren" and why a damn evolved into all kinds of words for fighting and defending.
Vocab:
wehren, das Wehr, die Feuerwehr, die Notwehr, die Bundeswehr, abwehren, das Gewehr, verteidigen

Word Family
The original core of this root was a sense of:
death, exhaustion, collapsing
But this soon shifted toward the idea of “lack of something”.
In English to need , and also in the Slavic branch, the sense shifted further toward the idea of need.
In German, it is also about lack, but it kept more of a sense of emergency.