GERMAN WORD OF THE DAY
If you’re starting to lose all hope of mastering German, don’t despair: we have just the word to describe your situation. And it may just help hone your language skills, too.
Published: 26 October 2022 17:23 CEST
Photo: Francesco Ungaro / Unsplash + Nicolas Raymond / flickr
Why do I need to know Despair?
Because this powerful and versatile word can be used to describe a range of strong emotions – and it also tells you something about how the German language functions. If that’s not enough, it may also help you remember another useful German word that comes up on occasion.
What does it mean?
The despair (pronounced like this) means despair, desperation or exasperation. It can be used anytime you’re at the end of your tether: for example, if you’re in despair at the political situation in your country, or you’re faced with a seemingly unsolvable issue. On a slightly less extreme note, it’s occasionally used to describe a general feeling of frustration, but more often it denotes a strong emotion like distress or hopelessness.
As in English, you not only have (or feel) desperation, but can also do something out of desperation (from despair). If you really work at it, you may be able to invoke this emotion in someone else. If this happens, it’s described as bringing someone to desperation (bring to despair), which basically means to exasperate someone.
As you might imagine, the noun Despair can also be turned into an adjective to describe how you feel. If you’re desperateit means you’re desperate or in despair.
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Where does it come from?
If you look closely at the noun Despair or the adjective despairyou may be able to spot a familiar word in there. That’s right: despair is basically a combination of the “ver-” prefix and doubtwhich means “to doubt”.
When you see “ver-” at the start of a German word, there are a few different ways it can impact its meaning. In some cases, it indicates a negation or giving something away, as in the verb to sellwhich means to sell. In other cases, like to enhance (to improve), it indicates a change in state. In the worst-case scenario, it indicates something going wrong, like get lostwhich changes to run (to walk) to getting lost or losing your way.
Despair could be interpreted as an instance of the last meaning. Though doubts and uncertainty are perfectly normal, dealing with them the wrong way can lead to despair.
Use it like this:
My therapist helped me overcome my despair.
My therapist helped me overcome my despair.
His constant questions drove me to despair.
His constant questions drove me to exasperation.