Word of the Week: děkovat – 'to thank'

Děkuji is among the first words that Czech learners tend to pick up. After all, we all want to be polite! Děkovat means ‘to thank’, and it has an associated noun, dík ‘thanks’.

At a very early point in Czech’s history, these words would have contained an extra nasal sound. This is lost in the Czech word, but can still be heard in the Polish equivalent, dziękować.

The D, the K and that nasal sound point to the word’s origin: in an old kind of German, which used the word denke for ‘thanks’. This is not too distantly related to Modern German’s danken and danke, and is related to English thank too.