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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

The first Wanderwort I learned was when I visited France and someone told me that the windows at the top of a ceiling (from the side) are called "vasistas". The term meanwhile seems to be used only for the round small windows primarily. [1]

So literally at some point a German guy came to France and asked "What's that?" and it made it into being the standard word for it in the language.

There's also a list of German words used in other languages on wikipedia which I found quite interesting. I bet there must be one for all sorts of languages [2]

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_in_an...

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>So literally at some point a German guy came to France and asked "What's that?" and it made it into being the standard word for it in the language

Makes me think of the various rivers Avon -- so named because Roman cartographers, labelling rivers, accost Celts about what that there is called. The Roman expects a name, but the Celt replies with the word for river in his language: "avon". Is there a term for this? Or better still, a curated list on Wikipedia?

While on rivers... Ribble, Ouse, Humber and probably others all apparently mean river as well

Salsa is similar in the sense that it just means sauce in Spanish but it was borrowed into English as the word for a very specific condiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...

Might be what you're looking for.

Obligatory Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

The Polish "wihajster" is a similar case. It comes from German "Wie heißt er? [What's his/its name?]" and refers to a nameless thing. https://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung/polnisch-deutsch/wihajs...

As a German myself, reading "vasistas" an then seeing where it comes from (Was ist das) is acutally hilarious

Oida! Vasistas! Leiwand!

Reminds me on the (incorrect) origin story of kangaroo. https://www.woot.com/blog/post/the-debunker-where-does-the-w...

Which reminds me of the gavagai thought experiment illustrating the inscrutability of reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscrutability_of_reference#Ga...

But why is this a Wanderwort? The article describes it as "a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade". What you say is just a word that was taken up from German by a couple of neighbouring countries. In that case virtually all words would be like that. This aside, of course it's a fun story...

The cardboard roll inside a roll of toilet paper is called a "der-der"... because when you're a kid you walk around the house saying into it "der-der".

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