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GERMAN · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

feil.

venal, capable of being bribed or prostituted

4 characters1 syllables approx.Deutsch language

Meaning & usage

adj[faɪ̯l]
  1. venal, capable of being bribed or prostituted

    derogatory · literary · not-comparable
    feile Knechte
    feile Dirnen
  2. for sale, vendible, purchasable (now at most predicatively with sein, stehen, and in the compounds below)

    dated · literary · not-comparable
Where this word comes from

From Middle High German veile, from Old High German feili (“for sale”), from Proto-West Germanic *failī. Possibly merged with a descendant of Proto-Germanic *falaz, but this is uncertain. Old High German fali is only attested once in a text that uses ai for ei, thus quite plausibly a mere scribal error (regarding also that short a should be umlauted to e). Cognate with Dutch veil. From *falaz stems Old Norse falr (whence Norwegian Nynorsk fal, Swedish fal). The latter is related with Old Church Slavonic плѣнъ (plěnŭ, “booty”), Ancient Greek πωλέω (pōléō, “sell”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.