One of my cool jobs this week is translating for a company that films trailers for books. Chin deep in synopses, I came across the adjective kinoreif. It’s an elegant and more German alternative to descriptors like filmisch or (more of a rarity) kinematisch.
I looked it up to find it doesn’t have a dedicated entry in my favorite etymological source, the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, but the online compendium nonetheless generated results from its corpora.1 This source shows citations dating back only to the early ’00’s. MyDict.com, another site that anchors German words in publications (mainly newspapers), traces it back to 1996.
Results from Linguee.com—which scours the Web for bilingual translations to give you the most common usages on the Internet—cite kinoreif on the Apple and Adobe websites, suggesting it meets German copywriting standards. Meanwhile, there’s hardly a peep about anything reif on my current go-to for all words colloquial, MundMische.de.
Is it a relatively new word, coined in response to an influx of foreign words? Filmisch breathes English and kinematisch is a trainwreck of Greek and French. The DWDS lists a scant handful of words that have -reif as a suffix, and most of them have to do with the actual softening of fruit. It’s not used like -mäßig, anyway, which will backflip into bed with anyone.
I can’t tell why the word receives such scant attention from either the hoary source or the slangy one. Macht nichts. I like it and I’m going to juice it for all its worth.
