hecheln.
to pant or breathe fast and loudly through one’s mouth (much like dogs do when hot or short of breath)
Meaning & usage
to pant or breathe fast and loudly through one’s mouth (much like dogs do when hot or short of breath)
Der Hund hechelt.
Where this word comes from
An onomatopoeic word liable to alteration and variation. Formally iterative of obsolete hechen, heichen (“to pant”), a chiefly Central and Low German word; compare Middle Low German hīgen, heigen, hēgen (“to pant”), from or related with Proto-West Germanic *hīgōn (whence Dutch hijgen, English hie). Another obsolete variant German hechzen is derived from or reinterpreted as the interjection hach! + the old suffix -zen (“to say something”). Further compare hauchen. Middle High German hecheln, hacheln is attested in the sense “to copulate”, which might be derived from underlying “to pant”, though this is rather unlikely. The sense exists also in the above-mentioned Middle Low German hīgen and in this language it is probably due to influence by hīwen (“to marry, to copulate”, later “to rape”; see Dutch huwen, Luxembourgish geheien, German Heirat). Probably, however, Middle High German hecheln is the same verb as that in etymology 2 below, through a cross-linguistic tendency of using verbs denoting ungentle treatments in a sexual sense (and vice versa).
to hackle, heckle (to dress [flax or hemp] with a hackle)
to heckle; to slag off
to hit; to beat
to copulate with; to fuck
Where this word comes from
From Middle High German hecheln, hacheln, derived from hechel, hachel, whence German Hechel (“hackle”), of West Germanic origin and related to the root of Haken (“hook”). For the sexual sense compare etymology 1 above.
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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.