Word of the Day

: September 10, 2015

ersatz

adjective AIR-sahts

What It Means

: being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation

ersatz in Context

If I'm going to eat ice cream, I want the real thing, not some non-fat ersatz version of it.

"Re-enactors dressed as British redcoats confront a group of ersatz militiamen, demanding they 'disperse at once.'" - Chris McDaniel, The Peninsula Daily News (Port Angeles, Washington), 17 July 2015

Did You Know?

Ersatz can be traced back in English to 1875, but it really came into prominence during World War I. Borrowed from German, where Ersatz is a noun meaning "substitute," the word was frequently applied as an adjective in English to items like ersatz coffee (from acorns) and ersatz flour (from potatoes)-products resulting from the privations of war. By the time World War II came around, bringing with it a resurgence of the word along with more substitute products, ersatz was wholly entrenched in the language. Today, ersatz can be applied to almost anything that seems like an artificial imitation, as in this quote from the August 10, 2012, issue of The Week: "The whole movie feels ersatz and expedient.…"