der Spruch
Meanings
Examples
My Articles
"versprechen" has maybe the most ironic double meaning ever. Today, we'll find out what it means and how those two connect.

Word Family
The core idea of the root (according to English sources) was:
ankle
German sources have the meaning for focused on motion and describe it as
twitching with the foot, unrest
In German, it shifted toward a sense of tracking (by foot) and then kept going toward the sense of perceiving.
English doesn’t have many relatives – spur, spoor, spurn.
They haven’t shifted their meaning as much, so they’re still somewhat close to ankle or to a broad sense of twitching.