Schlemiel

This is a list of words that have entered the English language from the Yiddish language, many of them by way of American English. There are differing approaches to the romanisation of Yiddish orthography (which uses the Hebrew alphabet) and the spelling of some of these words may therefore be variable (for example, schlep is also seen as shlep, schnoz as shnozz).

Many of these words are more common in the US entertainment industry, via vaudeville, the Catskills/Borscht Belt, and Hollywood. Others are more regionally oriented, e.g., in the New York City metropolitan area. A number of Yiddish words also entered English via large Jewish communities in Britain, particularly London, where Yiddish has influenced the Cockney dialect.

Most of Yiddish words are related to Hebrew, Germanic or Slavic forms, and some words of those origins have entered English via Yiddish.

Yiddish is a Germanic language, originally spoken by the Jews of Central and later Eastern Europe, written in the Hebrew alphabet, and containing a substantial substratum of words from Hebrew as well as numerous loans from Slavic languages. For that reason, some of the words listed below are in fact of Hebrew or Slavic origin, but have entered English via their Yiddish forms.

Since Yiddish is very closely related to modern German, many native Yiddish words have close German cognates; in a few cases it is difficult to tell whether English borrowed a particular word from Yiddish or from German. Since Yiddish was originally written using the Hebrew alphabet, some words have several spellings in the Latin alphabet. The transliterated spellings of Yiddish words and conventional German spellings are different, but the pronunciations are frequently the same (e.g., שוואַרץ shvarts in Yiddish is pronounced the same way as schwarz in German).

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