Yiddish

How to spell yiddish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce yiddish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does yiddish mean?

1. nounThe historical language of Ashkenazi Jews, based on High German and written in the Hebrew alphabet.
2. adjectiveRelating to the Yiddish language or the culture associated with it.

Yiddish in a sentence

• noun

  Her grandmother spoke yiddish at home in Warsaw before the war.

• adjective

  The theatre staged a revival of classic yiddish drama.

• noun

  The university offers an evening course in yiddish for beginners.

• adjective

  He collected old yiddish newspapers from the early twentieth century.

Where does yiddish come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Yiddish term yidish, a shortening of yidish-daytsh, which literally meant 'Jewish German'. The first element traces back through Middle High German to the German word for Jew, while daytsh meant 'German', the same source that gives us the modern English word 'Dutch' through a tangled history. Yiddish itself is a High German language carried by Ashkenazi Jews across central and eastern Europe, written in the Hebrew alphabet and woven through with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic vocabulary. English borrowed the name in the late nineteenth century, around the 1870s, when scholars and immigrant communities brought the language into wider notice. The spelling preserves the double 'd' and the familiar English '-ish' ending, the same suffix found in 'English' and 'Swedish', which is the part most likely to trip a writer who half remembers a single 'd'.

How the word is built

• yid (Jew, from German Jude/jüdisch)
• -ish (adjective and language suffix)