geil

What it means

1. 1.

   Great, brilliant, fantastic. The default all-purpose German word of approval, and by some distance the most-used slang adjective in the language.

2. 2.

   Of a person: horny. This sense never went away, which is why 'du bist geil' and 'das ist geil' land very differently.

Literally: Horny, randy — still the word's other live sense.

Examples with translations

• Das Konzert war voll geil.

  That concert was absolutely brilliant.

• Geile Jacke, wo hast du die her?

  Sick jacket, where'd you get it?

• Ey, der ist voll geil auf dich.

  Mate, he's seriously into you.

  Note: With 'auf' plus a person, the sexual reading is the only one available.

Where it comes from

Middle High German geil, 'exuberant, high-spirited, luxuriant' — the sexual narrowing came later, and the gardening sense survives in 'geiler Boden', over-rich soil. The approval sense spread out of West German youth speech in the 1970s–80s and was fully mainstream by the 1990s. Intensified forms (saugeil, affengeil, oberaffengeil) date the speaker fairly precisely to that era.

First attested: 1970s in the modern sense

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

saugeil, affengeil

Similar terms:

super, mega, stark