krass

What it means

1. 1.

   Extreme, intense, out of the ordinary — and evaluatively neutral. A krasse Party and a krasser Unfall are equally krass; only tone and context tell you whether the speaker approves.

2. 2.

   As a standalone interjection: whoa, no way. The German reflex on hearing something startling.

3. 3.

   As an intensifier before an adjective: 'krass gut', really good. This use is younger and more marked than the others.

Examples with translations

• Krass, hast du das gesehen?

  Whoa, did you see that?

• Der Film war echt krass.

  That film was intense.

• Sie hat krass abgeliefert.

  She absolutely delivered.

Where it comes from

From Latin crassus, 'thick, dense', which entered learned German meaning 'blatant, glaring' — a krasser Widerspruch is a stark contradiction, and that sense is still standard written German. Youth speech took the intensity and dropped the disapproval, a shift already visible by the late 1980s.

First attested: late 1980s in youth speech

Other forms

Similar terms:

heftig, übel