Handy

What it means

1. 1.

   A mobile phone. The standard German word — not slang at all any more, and used in contracts and news bulletins — but it is the country's most famous pseudo-anglicism, and English speakers reliably misparse it.

2. 2.

   'Handy' in English is an adjective meaning convenient. No English-speaking country calls a phone a handy, which is a recurring source of confusion in German-English conversations.

Examples with translations

• Hast du mein Handy gesehen?

  Have you seen my phone?

• Mein Handy ist gleich leer.

  My phone's about to die.

Where it comes from

Coined in German marketing in the early 1990s from the English adjective 'handy', probably with an assist from Motorola's wartime Handie-Talkie, whose name was known in the trade. The much-repeated story that it comes from Swabians asking 'Hän die kae Schnur?' ('have they got no cord?') is a joke, not an etymology, and is told as one.

First attested: early 1990s