Word.ws English Dictionary

Indo-Germanic

Indo-Germanic proper noun: indo-European (a major language family).

Proper noun

Indo-Germanic

  1. (Indo-European-studies, dated) Indo-European (a major language family)
  2. (Indo-European-studies, dated) Proto-Indo-European (a hypothetical language)
  3. (Indo-European-studies) Pre-Germanic Proto-Indo-European.

Adjective

Indo-Germanic (not comparable)

  1. (Indo-European-studies, dated) Indo-European.

Origin of Indo-Germanic

Coined by Dano-French geographer Conrad Malte-Brun in 1810 (as langues indo-germaniques) and popularized in German (as indogermanisch/Indogermanisch), especially following J. Klaproth's 1823 Asia polyglotta. At the time the term was coined, the Celtic languages were not yet considered Indo-European, and the Tocharian languages were not yet discovered; even after the inclusion of Celtic, Germanic remains the northwesternmost family (thanks to Icelandic). By surface analysis, Indo- + Germanic.

Questions about Indo-Germanic

What does Indo-Germanic mean?
Indo-Germanic means indo-European (a major language family).
What part of speech is Indo-Germanic?
Indo-Germanic can be a proper noun or an adjective.

Words near Indo-Germanic in the dictionary

  1. Indo-Europeanist
  2. Indo-Europeanists
  3. Indo-Europeanization
  4. Indo-Europeans
  5. Indo-Gangetic
  6. Indo-Germanic
  7. Indo-Greek
  8. Indo-Hittite
  9. Indo-Iranian
  10. Indo-Iranianist
  11. Indo-Iranianists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Indo-Germanic (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: “Indo-Germanic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/indo-germanic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.