(da)hintersteigen

ist hintergestiegen

stieg hinter

Meanings

to climb to the rear

(Technically, it can mean that, but I doubt you'll see it in real life any time soon. Maybe for climbing to the backseat of a car from the front.)

to understand something

("dahintersteigen" - the "da" often gets split off and moved elsewhere. Pretty similar to "durchsteigen", but this one is more about one particular "mystery". Think of a magical trick that you can't understand how it's done.)

Word Family tap to show/hide

Root: *steigh-

The core idea of this root was:

walking, striding upward

The most notable English relative is the noun stair, but the root is also the origin of stickler, which originally was about putting on a base, and hemistich and stoichiometry. Which are both words I had no clue about. The first one has something to do with poetry and the second one with chemistry, bit the common theme is “layering rows“. Kind of like stairs :).

In German, steigen and its relatives are the only members I could find.

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