Dictionary verb ab verb *pol- fallen abfallen

abfallen

(ab verb)

Meanings

1.
to decrease, to drop, to decline
(For certain metrics like quality, energy, performance and voltage, but it's overall pretty rare. You need to know the idiomatic phrasings.)
How useful:
Opposite (closest): ansteigen
2.
to descend, to slope down
(For terrain only. And it's what the terrain does, not what you do on the terrain. )
How useful:
Opposite (closest): ansteigen
3.
to come out of, to be yielded
(Mainly for financial gains or other compensations. The benefits are what does the "abfallen".)
How useful:
4.
to fall off
(Something literally falling off of something. Think of a bumper of a car, for example. Also for figurative loads that fall off of you. If the focus is on hitting the floor, then "runterfallen" is the better choice.)
How useful:

Examples

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The verb "fallen" - (almost) all Prefix Versions

Vocab:

fallen, auffallen, ausfallen, befallen, entfallen, einfallen, abfallen, anfallen, verfallen,...


Word Family

Root: *pol-

The core idea of this root was:

falling

It doesn’t have any other relatives besides to fall and fallen (and “to fell” and “fällen”) in German and English and it is notably absent from the Latin branch of the Indo-European family. There, the word for falling was *kadere, which is the origin of words like cadence, incident or case.

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