The English language has incorporated various loanwords, terms, phrases, or quotations from the German language. A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where a meaning or idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language. Some of the expressions are relatively common (e.g., hamburger), but most are comparatively rare. In many cases, the loanword has assumed a meaning substantially different from its German forebear. English and German both are West Germanic languages, though their relationship has been obscured by the lexical influence of Old Norse and Norman French (as a consequence of the Norman conquest of England in 1066) on English as well as the High German consonant shift. In recent years, however, many English words have been borrowed directly from German. Typically, English spellings of German loanwords suppress any umlauts (the superscript, double-dot diacritic in Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, and ü) of the original word or replace the umlaut letters with Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe, ue, respectively (as is done commonly in German speaking countries when the umlaut is not available; the origin of the umlaut was a superscript E). German words have been incorporated into English usage for many reasons: As languages, English and German descend from the common ancestor language West Germanic and further back to Proto-Germanic; because of this, some English words are essentially identical to their German lexical counterparts, either in spelling (Hand, Sand, Finger) or pronunciation ("fish" = Fisch, "mouse" = Maus), or both (Arm, Ring); these are excluded from this list. German common nouns fully adopted into English are in general not initially capitalized, and the German letter "ß" is generally changed to "ss".

German terms commonly used in English

Most of these words will be recognized by many English speakers; they are commonly used in English contexts. Some, such as wurst and pumpernickel, retain German connotations, while others, such as lager and hamburger, retain none. Not every word is recognizable outside its relevant context. A number of these expressions are used in American English, under the influence of German immigration, but not in British English.

Food and drink

Sports and recreation

Animals

Philosophy and history

Society and culture

Technology

Other aspects of everyday life

German terms common in English academic context

German terms sometimes appear in English academic disciplines, e.g. history, psychology, philosophy, music, and the physical sciences; laypeople in a given field may or may not be familiar with a given German term.

Academia

Architecture

Arts

Heraldry

Music

Genres

Selected works in classical music

Carols

Modern songs

Theatre

Typography

Biology

Chemistry

Chess

Economics

Geography

Geology

Minerals including:

History

(Some terms are listed in multiple categories if they are important to each.)

The Third Reich

Other historical periods

Military terms

Linguistics

Literature

Mathematics and formal logic

Medicine

Philosophy

Physical sciences

Politics

Psychology

Sociology

Theology

German terms mostly used for literary effect

There are a few terms which are recognised by many English speakers but are usually only used to deliberately evoke a German context:

Terms rarely used in English

German quotations used in English

Some famous English quotations are translations from German. On rare occasions an author will quote the original German as a sign of erudition.