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 "sinn" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "sinn" 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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Hello. “im Sinne von” gets translated as “in the sense of” But Sinne is plural of Sinn or? It seems odd it would be plural if we are talking about a specific sense of a word no?
And surely if it is plural it would be im Sinnen von?
If it were a plural, it would be “in DEN Sinnen” ;)
yeah i noticed that this morning too. I’m pretty sure i wouldn’t make that mistake today..could be i was tired when i wrote that, could be i’ve come a long way in a year….
It’s a Dativ-e. It’s a singular noun, masculine or neuter, that has an “e” in the dative form. I think that used to be how the dative worked in older forms of German. You would have things like “dem Manne” (dem Mann).
Now it’s mostly in fixed expressions (im Grunde genommen), words like “zuhause” and “heutzutage”, or more formal or literary language (im Zuge der Ermittlungen).
I don’t mean to preach to the choir if you know that by now, but maybe someone else will have the same question.
Thanks very much for your reply – I actually never got to the bottom of this and didn’t know about this historical aspect of german – I think i might have even asked myself about the “e” in “Grunde” before too but never followed that up… that’s super interesting
Wow, I don’t know why some comments on the dictionary entries just completely slip through my feed and others don’t.
Perfect answer from coleussanctus!
I’d just add that “im Sinn” without the “e” would even sound unidiomatic, at least to me.
And there is “in meinem Sinne”, which is also fairly common, slightly formal and means that something is “lining up with your interests” or “suits you well”.
maybe I should be a bit more proactive in reminding you..
good to know about “In meinem Sinne” too…
To give an example:
– Wenn das in Ihrem Sinne ist, würden wir den Vertrag direkt fertig machen.
Yes, please do remind me. I really don’t see some of them for some reason.
will do and thanks for the example !