Oh, You Like Bread? Name One Hundred German Words for It

The first time I tried to explain the pronunciation of umlauts to an American friend, I very nearly despaired. How do you explain a noise that someone simply has not had to make with their mouth for the past twenty years of their life? I know how to make the noise, but how do I convey it? When I say “ö,” my lips are in the same shape as when I say “o.” I lack the words to explain exactly what to do with your tongue inside your mouth to make a new sound, and if I get started on trying, shit’s gonna get real weird real fast.

Good news: I have since learned about a hack that made things mindblowingly easy, and has also led to me sitting alone in my apartment making noises at my computer, like a normal person.

Say, “eh.” Ehhhh. Ehhhh, and now, while still making that wonderful noise, purse your lips. Keep pursing, like you’re about to whistle, only you’re not whistling, you just keep doing your little ehhh thing. Purse, purse. There you go. You are no longer saying ehh. You are now saying öhhh, which is also the German noise for, “uhhh, I dunno” so you’re welcome for this vital vocabulary.

Cöngrätülätiöns!

For ü, do the same, only instead of an ehhh noise, you start with eee. Ä is easier, because the English language already has an ä sound in how you pronounce some of your a sounds. If you say can’t in American English, you’re doing it. That’s cän’t, bäby.

Don’t worry, I won’t keep putting umlauts in places they don’t belong throughout the rest of this. I just had to get this off my chest right away, because all words this time will feature ö!

Our Ö Special guests are:

Knörzchen

Have you ever seen that list of German words for apple cores? If you haven’t, I’ll tell you this much: It is long.

I personally actually can’t remember a single word off of that list without checking, because I’m boring in this sense and call the apple core das Kerngehäuse. Kern means core, Gehäuse means something like casing. There’s the word Haus in there though, which means house. So in my opinion, Kerngehäuse is already a really cute word. It’s the little house where the apple core lives!

I tried to look up why in the world we have so many words for this thing. The only real answer I found was this: We just really, really like apples. Apples have traveled nearly everywhere in the world, and everywhere in Germany, and everybody harbors warm feelings toward apples. And when everyone in every place harbors warm feelings toward something, apparently, everyone starts making up their own words for it.

So that’s adorable as hell. Humans are great.

Knörzchen has nothing to do with apples, but the sentiment is a similar one. Since we like apples so much that we made up hundreds of words for their cores, it should come as no surprise that we have a ridiculous amount of words for a specific piece of bread, too.

Because, as we hopefully all remember:

Germans love bread.

We love bread. My fucking God do we love bread.

Knörzchen is actually the word for a part of a loaf of bread that is very controversial: the end piece. Beloved by some, loathed by others, and I guess that’s why we have so many words for it? Because that’s how this works, apparently.

I grew up in Southwest Germany, in a place where we spoke in Rhine-Hessian dialect. So Knörzchen is the word I learned, and even though this word is already a dialect word, I wouldn’t even say it’s pronounced the way it’s written. My grandfather pronounced it more like Knötzscher. Knötzscher doesn’t really exist as a word though. Knörzchen does, more or less, along with a long, long list of other words for the same thing.

I browsed one of those lists the other day, and I will tell you upfront: I did not know literally a single one of the other words. I’ve lived in many places in my lifetime, and yet I still only know Knörzchen, and only from my own family. I could not tell you what other German people I know call the end piece of a loaf of bread. If anyone has ever used a specific word for it around me, it has bounced right off of me. It’s Knörzchen, and it’ll always be Knörzchen to me.

In the same vein: My best friend is from Bavaria, so our deep South, and sometimes when he hears me say Knörzchen he still has no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

For the sake of being thorough, and only for that, I will let you in on a normal regular German word you can use for an end piece: Endstück. It literally means end piece. So you can use that. Or you can take to the search engine of your choice (hopefully not Google), find one of those silly lists with increasingly strange German words for bread, and pick one at random.

Brötchen

Did I say Ö Special? This is a Bread Special now. I wish everything I write could be a bread special somehow. It’s not usually, but not for lack of trying, believe me.

Anyway.

If you’ve seen or heard me talk about German, you’ve probably seen or heard me mention this word. Because it’s one of my favorites, if not my favorite German word.

Brötchen means bread roll. -chen is one of our diminutives, so it comes from Brot, the word for bread. Which means we made a bread roll, and we decided, well, this is just small bread. It’s just a little bread. A little baby bread. A breadling.

I’ve said this a thousand times, and I will say it a thousand times more – I just think it’s adorable. I think we’re cute for that. The other day, a coworker tried to tell me that Brötchen actually doesn’t come from Brot, that that’s just a funny coincidence, and I did not want to believe her. I still don’t. All my sources, at least, tell me that I’m right, and that we were just being really, really cute. And thank God for that.

The Ö here comes from the way we form diminutives, by the way. Brot itself just has a normal o (like in open), but once you tack on the diminutive, it becomes an ö. You can also see this in the unfortunately recently somewhat re-popularized word Fräulein (please don’t use this, I beg of you), which comes from Frau (woman) and is formed with -lein, another diminutive we don’t use as often. Mädchen, our word for girl, is also a diminutive, but the original word it comes from isn’t really in use anymore.

Mädchen is the normal and perfectly acceptable word for girl. It’s just what it is now. Fräulein is terrible, but you can fight back in kind: If a man (ein Mann) calls you Fräulein, you just go right ahead and call him a Männchen, or even Männlein.

One last point on Brötchen: We don’t have as many words for bread rolls as we have for end pieces. We are still a country that loves bread, though, so there are other words for rolls. In my experience, everybody in Germany will know what a Brötchen is, but it doesn’t go the other way around. They’re Semmel in the South and (I think) Schrippen in the North, but don’t quote me on that. I haven’t done the research. I’m too happy with my Brötchen.

Hömma

This has strayed from bread, which is fair enough, since it’s not actually a Bread Special. I will now introduce you to a word that does not exist: Hömma.

Hömma isn’t a real word, but when I tried to think of German ö words I liked, it still came to mind. It’s a very sloppy way of saying, “Hör mal,” which is a command to listen. Hören means listen, mal in this context means sometime, more or less. It’s one of those things that are difficult to translate. “Hör mal” can often be preceded by “also,” which in German does not mean the same as it does in English, which used to confuse me very badly. Normally, our also is more of a well.

“Also hör mal!” is an expression, an outburst, of exasperation with someone for doing or saying something outrageous. I think that sums it up best. It’s my response to when it’s one hour until dinner time and my dog is already begging, to take a very harmless example.

I deeply enjoy shortening it to hömma. When I say it’s not a word, I mean that written out like this, it doesn’t exist, you won’t find it in a dictionary. But it’s how I say it out loud. There is this image I think German has on the internet, as being a complicated and mystifying language with long beautiful words and deep meanings. Half of the time, though, none of us have the patience to actually pronounce every part of our long, long words.

Sometimes you gotta trim away all those pesky consonants, put your hands on your hips, and say, Also hömma!

Gönn dir

Since the last two sections ended up a little short, here’s a bonus fourth one. I’m doing something terrible to myself here. I thought “also hör mal” was difficult to translate, but “gönn dir” feels near impossible to me. Have you heard of Tja? Tja is like the final boss of German translation, there is no word in the English language to convey what it means, what it feels like, what it represents. Gönn dir, I think, comes close to that.

Gönn dir is somewhat of a slang term these days. The words have both existed for a long time, but using them in the way I’m talking about is something that started coming up a few years ago, with my generation or thereabouts. The verb gönnen alone is already a little tricky to translate. It’s transitive, which means it has to be used with an object. If you are using it on another person, you are granting something to that person. If you are using it on yourself, you are indulging in something.

And that’s the exact sort of nuance I mean to talk about. Because if you grant something to someone else, you can just as well also grant yourself something. That works, you can use the verb to grant like that. You can grant yourself stuff. But with gönnen, if you use it on yourself, granting yourself something doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t quite catch the amount of decadence you’re performing here. It doesn’t catch the inherent hedonism of gönn dir. You are indulging. You should be indulging.

Gönn dir, when used exactly like that, is a command. Gönn is the imperative of gönnen, and dir is the dative case of du (you). You’re telling someone else to indulge. It’s the same idea as “treat yourself,” but I will die on this hill: “Treat yourself” does not even come close to “gönn dir.” A treat is a little thing someone has earned. A treat is, to bring in my furry roommate once more, something I give my dog when he has behaved well. You can treat yourself, sure.

When I think about gönnen, I am a lord sitting upon my riches, and I have decided to randomly bestow them upon someone because I’m feeling like it today.

You know? You get me.

So I say “gönn dir” a lot in response to friends telling me they’re about to do something decadent for themselves for no reason other than they want to. Once you’re doing that, of course, the next step is to use it where it makes no sense.

Caught a cold? Gönn dir.

Going to the bathroom? Gönn dir.

Half of the fun of languages is being inappropriate with them, but I don’t even have it in myself to end this one on that note. Yeah, I do use gönn dir inappropriately, but I use it appropriately much more often. It’s just so close to my heart. It’s so important to me. Today, reader, gönn dir. Find something and gönn dir, and remember that Gönnung (which is the nominalization of the verb that The Youth have come up with and definitely 100% is not a real word), Gönnung is about indulgence, it is about decadence, it is about being a little bit ridiculous, perhaps bordering on perverse. Go out, be merry, and gönn dir.