As a 53y old German living in Germany I had to look up "Wanderwort". Because in German that's a "Lehnwort" --- a "loanword". And it means that's a word everyb

As a 53y old German living in Germany I had to look up "Wanderwort". Because in German that's a "Lehnwort" --- a "loanword". And it means that's a word everybody uses and it came from some other language, like all the examples in this thread and in the post. When I was a kid we also spoke about the "Fremdwort", "foreign word" which is a word where there also is a "native German word". However as there are so many corner cases, "Fremdwort" came out of fashion, rightfully so, in linguistic circles. So the difference of "loanword" and "Wanderwort" is that the latter is a loanword in a number of other languages. TIL... Edit: oh sweet: the google ngram viewer has NO occurence of "Wanderwort" up to 2019. amazing.