schwanen.
to become apparent, to dawn [with dative ‘on someone’] (of an unfortunate realization or future experience; idiomatically translated with inverted objects as 'to suspect, to dread')
Meaning & usage
to become apparent, to dawn [with dative ‘on someone’] (of an unfortunate realization or future experience; idiomatically translated with inverted objects as 'to suspect, to dread')
Mir schwant nichts Gutes.
Ihm schwante, dass er das bereuen würde.
Where this word comes from
Sometimes taken as a loan from Middle Low German, but first attestations are nearly contemporaneous (1514 for Low German, 1543 for High German, according to Grimm). Semantic derivation disputed. The Duden dictionary suspects a learned jocular translation from Latin olet mihi (“I smell [something]”) (with dative construction as in German), due to phonetic similarity of Latin olēre (“to smell”) and olor (“swan”). Grimm however, because of the early and near-contemporaneous attestations in different regions, sees it as an inherited word of the common people, connecting it to the traditional Germanic association of swans with prophecy and fate (cf. the Norns) and pointing to the synonymous expression Schwansfedern haben/tragen (literally “to have/wear swan's feathers”). Earlier variants contain -d- (schwanden, Low German swanden), probably under influence of ahnden, a once common variant of ahnen (“to anticipate, to suspect”).
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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.