Studies reckon that English contains about 6,000 Germanisms.
We can all recognize the German influence in words like dachshund, diesel, doppelganger, Doppler (effect), Edelweiss, Fahrenheit, Freudian (slip), glockenspiel, Heimlich (maneuver), Hertz, kaiser (roll), kaput, kindergarten, lager, ohm, poltergeist, pretzel, rottweiler, schadenfreude, schnauzer, strudel, waltz, wunderkind, yodel, zeitgeist, and Wiener schnitzel.
There are also words that we might not think of as being German at all: masochism, Pez, and the -ja part of "Ouija board."
"Hamster," too, has German origins, as do polka, muesli, quartz, rucksack, wreck, zig-zag, and zinc.
"Dollar" is the Anglicized form of the German taler, the name given to coins first minted in 1519 from locally mined silver in Joachimsthal (now Czech Jáchymov) in Bohemia. "Nickel" is another example, shortened from the German Kupfernickel ("fool's cooper," for ore which looks like cooper ore but does not contain the valuable metal). The British shilling (schilling) was formerly a German coin, and was the standard monetary unit of Austria before the euro.
Ersatz, which in English implies something that is artificial, inferior, or fake, in German suggests an imitation or substitute. The uses are similar, but not quite the same; Germans, for instance, refer to a spare tire as Ersatzreifen, while spare parts are Ersatzteile.
Volkswagen (which in the '90s introduced Fahrvergnügen, loosely translated as "driving pleasure," to the American vernacular) literally means "folk's (people's) car."
When researcher Robbin Knapp published a book of Germanisms in 2005, he counted German as the "third most popular foreign language at all levels of education, behind Spanish and French." Roughly 355,000 students annually, he wrote, learned German in grades K-12, with another 89,000 following up at colleges and universities.
In the 2000 U.S. census, nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population (17.3 percent or 47.4 million people) considered themselves German Americans; that is, their ancestors came from a German-speaking part of Europe. The census suggested that German Americans formed the largest ethnic group in the U.S., before even Irish, English, and African Americans.
And let's not forget—the words for America's favorite foods are German: hamburger, frankfurter, and wiener.
Further reading