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Deutsche Idiomatik Wörterbuch Der Deutschen
Deutsche Idiomatik Wörterbuch Der Deutschen is the dictionary of German idioms: the thousands of fixed figurative expressions — Redewendungen — in which so much of real German lives, collected, explained, and illustrated in one reference volume.
Idioms are where literal German ends: nobody who translates word by word will guess what it means to ‘have a pig’, to ‘understand only railway station’, or to let ‘five be even’. This dictionary gathers that figurative layer entire — its origins where they are known, its exact meaning, its register, and the sentences in which it naturally lives.
It is written for advanced learners of German, translators, and teachers — and for native speakers curious about the phrases they use daily without ever having seen them explained.
Every language hides a second language inside the first, made of images: hands, animals, food, weather, crafts, and war turned into figurative speech. German’s idiom stock is famously rich, and it is the layer that separates the learner who passes examinations from the speaker who follows a film, a joke, a pub conversation. This dictionary is the map of that layer. Its entries do what a bilingual dictionary cannot: they explain what an expression means as a whole, warn where it is joking, old-fashioned, or rude, show its grammar (which cases, which verb, what may vary), and anchor it in example sentences. For the translator it is an instrument of survival; for the advanced learner, the door into the German that Germans actually speak; for the teacher, a quarry of the lessons students remember forever — because an idiom understood is a story acquired.
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About This Book
A learner can know every word in a sentence and miss the sentence. This dictionary exists for that gap: the complete idiomatic layer of German, alphabetised, explained, and exemplified — the reference in which the language’s figurative soul is shelved.
What Readers Will Find
The Idioms Themselves
Thousands of Redewendungen and fixed expressions, from the everyday to the literary: their meanings stated precisely, their origins sketched where tradition preserves them, and their variations shown — the whole stock searchable by its keyword.
Register and Reality
Each entry keeps the user safe in society: is this expression jocular or vulgar, youthful or dated, regional or standard? Idioms mishandled embarrass more than idioms unknown, and this dictionary’s warnings are as valuable as its definitions.
Grammar and Examples
An idiom is also a construction — it governs cases, fixes word order, allows some changes and forbids others. The entries show the pattern and prove it in example sentences, so the reader can use the expression, not merely recognise it.
Key Features
Completeness of the idiomatic layer is the feature: this is the reference for the whole figurative system, not a phrasebook’s selection. Usage guidance is the second — register, grammar, variation — and the exemplification the third: every expression shown alive in sentences.
Who This Book Is For
It is for advanced learners of German (B2–C1), translators and interpreters, teachers and their most curious students, journalists and writers working in German, and native speakers who love their own language’s attic of images.
How to Use This Book
Look up the idiom when you meet it — in a novel, a series, a conversation remembered — and read the whole entry, examples included: context is everything with figurative language. Then adopt sparingly: one idiom a week, used correctly and in register, enriches a learner’s German more than fifty collected and misfired. Collect your favourites in a notebook with the example that taught them.
Related Books
Vocabulary building is in German Vocabulary Book. The usage authority is Duden Richtiges Und Gutes Deutsch.
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