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 "womoglich" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "womoglich" 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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Came across a Der Spiegel piece where this seems to just be used simply as a synonym for ‘possibly’, without any sense of shock. Is that possible? Maybe a more written rather than spoken thing? Are there lots of subtleties between it and ‘vielleicht’ or ‘möglicherweise’ or are they pretty interchangeable? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed.
The notion of “shocking” was a bit too much maybe. I took it out of the definition.
What I mean is more of an undertone of “hmm, this is unusual.”
But it’s true that you can use it as a more fancy alternative for “vielleicht”. Don’t do it in spoken German though, it a bit over the top.
Got you. Thanks for the clarification.
Interesting word. So should one think of the “wo” as a distraction as this doesn’t have anything to do with a location (real or abstract)?
Ha, for the longest time, I thought this word was “wohlmöglich” and “womöglich” still feels wrong to me.
If you think of it as “where possible” then the “wo” makes sense though. Like… in some place or reality “X” is possible.
Thanks…I think i need to go away and look at some more examples for this one…