West Germanic cognates

This is a list of cognates shared between the West Germanic languages. I have limited this to English (and Old English), Dutch, and German.

What are cognates? Simply put, they are words that have been inherited from the same parent word. For example, the English word fish and the German word Fisch are cognates and come from the same Proto-Germanic word. In this case, it is quite easy to see that the two words are related; in many other cases, however, the kinship is not as easy to spot. For example, the English word eat is cognate with German essen, even though they do not resemble each other at first. However, through knowledge of sound changes, we can determine what words are cognate.

English words that did not survive up to New English and are thus reconstructions are in bold. Words that survived, but are archaic, dialectal, or obsolete are italicized. Note that words in italics include those that are no longer used in their original part of speech, even if they continue to be used after being converted to another part of speech, e.g., a word that was originally an adjective lives on as a noun.

Nouns
Key:


 * m - masculine
 * f - feminine
 * n - neuter

For Dutch, many traditionally feminine nouns are commonly referred to by the masculine, and so they are labeled f/m.

Preterite-present verbs
In the English section, both the expected infinitive and the expected present tense form are given. Any reconstructed OE infinitive forms are put in parentheses.