Adjective: echt
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more echt |
| Superlative | most echt |
Sample Sentences
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I had heard [the phrase] in Lamb House, Rye, but it was less echt Henry James than Henry James mocking echt Meredith. [1980, Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers, Penguin, page 8:]
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And yes, that's what it's about. Some punk writing about sleeping with Ginsberg, despite their fifty-year age difference and homogenous sexuality. What's echt heebish? There's your answer. A hack fag poet and the power to plant him on playlists nationwide. [2002 March 27, Buck Turgidson, “Heebetudinous”, in alt.california (Usenet):]
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An echt Burkean with a snob’s disdain for the contemporary Republican Party, Hart hinted at a road not taken[…]. [2009 January 18, Ross Douthat, “When Buckley Met Reagan”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021:]
Adjectives inflected like echt
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
Borrowed from German echt (“real”). The German term originates from Middle Low German echt (“lawful, genuine”), contraction of ehacht, variant form of ehaft (“lawful, pertaining to the law”) from ê(e) (“law, marriage”), from Proto-West Germanic *aiw. First use in English appears c. 1916. See: German Adjectives '
echt'.