touch wood
[tʌtʃ‿wʊd]
The verdict
“touch wood” is outside the top-ranked German vocabulary, used as an interjection - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency German
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - eine Formel, um jemandem Glück und Gelingen bei einem Vorhaben zu wünschen, dem deutschen (und der wörtlichen Übersetzung) „Klopf auf Holz!“, „dreimal auf Holz geklopft“ oder auch dem „Toi, toi, to...
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | touch wood |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Interjection |
| IPA | [tʌtʃ‿wʊd] |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “touch wood” sits in German frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for touch wood is 10 letters long, classified as an interjection, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [tʌtʃ‿wʊd]. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "eine Formel, um jemandem Glück und Gelingen bei einem Vorhaben zu wünschen, dem deutschen (und der wörtlichen Übersetzung) „Klopf auf Holz!“, „dreimal auf Holz geklopft“ oder auch dem „Toi, toi, to...".
No misspelling variants are generated for touch wood in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable German patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct German form is touch wood, spelled T-O-U-C-H- -W-O-O-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1eine Formel, um jemandem Glück und Gelingen bei einem Vorhaben zu wünschen, dem deutschen (und der wörtlichen Übersetzung) „Klopf auf Holz!“, „dreimal auf Holz geklopft“ oder auch dem „Toi, toi, toi!“ entspricht
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “touch wood, German word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/de/wort/touch-wood
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "touch wood"?
What does "touch wood" mean?
How do you pronounce "touch wood"?
What language does "touch wood" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “touch wood”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct German spelling is T-O-U-C-H- -W-O-O-D - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [tʌtʃ‿wʊd] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more German words and confusable pairs in the same reference. German words
Nearby German words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our German index: