Word.ws English Dictionary

notgeld

notgeld noun: money issued by an institution in a time of economic or political crisis, usually without official sanction from the central government.

Noun

notgeld (usually uncountable, plural notgelds)

  1. (usually) Money issued by an institution in a time of economic or political crisis, usually without official sanction from the central government.
    • The catalog set I saw was pretty impressive (in size anyway). There were literally thousands of pieces of notgeld listed in three volumes!1993 December 1, barth.richards, “Anyone interested in Royal Doulton”, in rec.collecting (Usenet)
    • I am starting to put some scans of stuff from my notgeld up on: […]1997 August 25, Nuwc, “view some notgeld”, in rec.collecting.paper-money (Usenet)
  2. (countable, rare, usually) A piece of notgeld.
    • I am interested also in any information about Specimens,^([sic]) Trial proofs, etc, and any error note of the above, as well as any unlisted notes, including emergency issues and notgelds.1998 February 17, Marc Beoutis, “New Caledonia, New Hebrides & Tahiti”, in rec.collecting.paper-money (Usenet)
    • But I did hear from the seller of the defecating donkey notgelds, so hopefully I should get those soon:)2007 April 9, Sibirskmoneta, “An interesting week with banknote dealers :(”, in rec.collecting.paper-money (Usenet)

Examples of notgeld in a sentence

  • This is a piece of Austrian notgeld (Heller is 100th Krone) issued by the chamber of commerce(equivalent) of the town of Mattighofen and was due to be redeemed for coin before 1 jan^([sic]) 1921.1998 February 20, Ernest Bramah, “Please Help ID German Note”, in rec.collecting.paper-money (Usenet):
  • The most complete collection of notgeld online comes courtesy of Brooklynite Miguel Oks, whose German ancestors began archiving the bills in the 1930s—thousands of which you can see on his Flickr.2013 September 24, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, “The Intricate Makeshift Money Germans Relied On Between World Wars”, in Gizmodo, →OCLC...
  • There are still wide gulfs between them: the notgelds were issued by local authorities.Notgelds therefore were "official tokens" and had the force of legitimate money.2011 October 24, Watcher, “2011 Lundy Puffins”, in uk.rec.collecting.coins (Usenet):

Forms of notgeld

pluralnotgelds

Origin of notgeld

Unadapted borrowing from German Notgeld.

Questions about notgeld

What does notgeld mean?
Notgeld means money issued by an institution in a time of economic or political crisis, usually without official sanction from the central government.
How do you use notgeld in a sentence?
This is a piece of Austrian notgeld (Heller is 100th Krone) issued by the chamber of commerce(equivalent) of the town of Mattighofen and was due to be redeemed for coin before 1 jan^([sic]) 1921.
What part of speech is notgeld?
Notgeld is a noun.
What is the plural of notgeld?
The plural of notgeld is notgelds.

Words near notgeld in the dictionary

  1. noteworthiest
  2. noteworthily
  3. noteworthiness
  4. noteworthy
  5. Noteć
  6. notgeld
  7. notgelds
  8. Notgrass
  9. Notgrove
  10. Noth
  11. nothag

Source and license

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