Dating App Vocabulary in French, German and Spanish

Language courses will teach you to describe your family, order a meal and complain about a hotel room. They will not teach you the register that most people relocating abroad actually need within the first month, which is the one that runs on a phone at eleven at night.

Dating app language is its own dialect. It is informal by default, it has fixed phrases that do very specific jobs, and it moves faster than textbooks do. Here is what actually gets typed in three languages.

One rule before anything else

Apps are informal. du in German, tu in French, tú in Spanish, from the first message and without negotiation. This is the one context where the usual advice about waiting to be offered the informal form does not apply. Opening with Sie or vous on an app reads as a joke you did not intend to make.

German

etwas Festes: something serious, a proper relationship. Ich suche etwas Festes is the standard profile line and carries no drama at all.

etwas Lockeres: the opposite, something casual. Neutral in tone, and the honest counterpart to the above.

das Kennenlernen: the getting-to-know-you stage, used as a noun. Erstmal Kennenlernen means let's not decide anything yet.

sich melden: to get in touch. Ich melde mich is I'll text you, and it is also the standard way of not texting anyone, in every language.

einen Korb bekommen: literally to receive a basket, meaning to be turned down. Centuries old, entirely current, and more likely to be said to a friend afterwards than to you directly.

ghosten: borrowed straight from English, conjugated German. Er hat mich geghostet.

Bock haben: to be up for something, as covered in the German register article. Hast du Bock auf einen Kaffee? is the standard low-pressure first move.

French

une relation sérieuse: a serious relationship, the profile phrase.

boire un verre: to have a drink, and the default first suggestion. On boit un verre ? is lighter than proposing dinner and is what most first meetings actually are.

matcher: borrowed and conjugated. On a matché il y a deux semaines.

ghoster: same treatment. Il m'a ghosté.

se prendre un râteau: literally to take a rake to the face, meaning to be turned down. Vivid, common, and used with a certain relish.

tu fais quoi dans la vie ?: what do you do, the standard opener after the first exchange. Note the word order, which is spoken French rather than textbook French.

on se capte: let's be in touch, casual. Younger register than on se tient au courant.

One to recognise and not to type: un plan cul describes a purely physical arrangement and is crude rather than neutral. It appears in profiles, it is not something to use lightly, and knowing what it means is more useful than being able to say it.

Spanish

quedar: to meet up, and one of the most useful verbs in peninsular Spanish. ¿Quedamos el jueves? In Latin America salir or vernos does the same job.

algo serio: something serious, the profile phrase.

un rollo: a fling, a casual thing. Solo busco un rollo is direct but not vulgar.

ligar: to flirt, to pull. Ligar is what you do; un ligue is the person.

dejar en visto: to leave someone on read. Spanish has the crispest phrase for this of any language here. Me dejó en visto needs no explanation to anyone under fifty.

dar calabazas: literally to give pumpkins, meaning to turn someone down. As old and as alive as the German basket.

un flechazo: love at first sight, literally an arrow shot. Romantic rather than ironic, and still used sincerely.

The three phrases that do the same job

It is worth noticing that all three languages have an idiom for rejection built from a physical object: a basket, a rake, a pumpkin. None of them translates and all three are perfectly current. If you learn one thing from this article, learn to recognise those, because they will be used about a situation you are in before anyone uses them to you.

The other shared feature is that all three have simply absorbed the English app verbs. Matchen, matcher, matchear. Ghosten, ghoster, ghostear. You do not need to learn a native equivalent, because there is not one in daily use.

The register trap on the way out

The apps are informal, and the transition off them is not. The moment a conversation moves to a first meeting, French returns to its greeting rules and German to its particles. People who have spent two weeks typing in one register sometimes arrive speaking in it, which is where the mismatch shows.

Learning a register you cannot practise in advance

This is vocabulary you meet in writing, alone, on a phone, which is actually the ideal condition for capturing it.

Save the exchange, not the word. Quedar = to meet up is thin. ¿Quedamos el jueves? sent at half eleven, answered with a yes and a location is a usable memory with the register attached. Vokabulo Scenes hold that, and a free account includes three.

Paste the message into Translate. App messages are short, abbreviated and full of particles, which is exactly where a word-by-word lookup fails and a sentence-level one works.

Then let the levels handle the rest. This vocabulary arrives in bursts and then goes quiet, which is the pattern spaced repetition is built for.

The short version

Use the informal form from message one. Learn etwas Festes, une relation sérieuse and algo serio for what you want, and einen Korb, un râteau and calabazas for what you might get.

And learn dejar en visto in whichever language you need it. You will recognise the feeling long before you recognise the phrase.

Got a message you could not parse? Paste the whole thing into Vokabulo and keep the phrase. Free to start on iPhone and iPad. 💬