Belsnickel
Belsnickel proper noun: a companion of St. Nicholas in some Germanophone regions, with various cultural roles, including rewarding well-behaved children with gifts and punishing ill-behaved children by corporal punishment or by spiriting them away from their homes. Homologous with Krampus in other regions.
Proper noun
Belsnickel
- A companion of St. Nicholas in some Germanophone regions, with various cultural roles, including rewarding well-behaved children with gifts and punishing ill-behaved children by corporal punishment or by spiriting them away from their homes. Homologous with Krampus in other regions.
- [Describing a market scene of the 1780s] Spotted throughout the marketplace, too, were piles of greens—cedar and pine trees—awaiting purchase by the German burghers, who would dress them gaily in candles on Christmas Eve while their kinder watched—some quaking from fear of the Belsnickel Man, who...1973, Samuel Redsecker II Slaymaker, Captives' Mansion: An American Family Chronicle Covering Nine Generations and Two Hundred Years in a Pennsylvania Rural Manor, Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 39
Origin of Belsnickel
Borrowed from Pennsylvania German Belsnickel.
Questions about Belsnickel
- What does Belsnickel mean?
- Belsnickel means a companion of St. Nicholas in some Germanophone regions, with various cultural roles, including rewarding well-behaved children with gifts and punishing ill-behaved children by corporal punishment or by spiriting them away from their homes. Homologous with Krampus in other regions.
- What part of speech is Belsnickel?
- Belsnickel is a proper noun.
Words near Belsnickel in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Belsnickel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “Belsnickel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/belsnickel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.