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“Wert thou a Leopard, thou wert Germane to the Lion.” So wrote William Shakespeare in his five-act tragedy Timon of Athens, using an old (and now-obsolete) sense of germane meaning “closely akin.” Germane comes to us from the Middle English word germain, meaning “having the same parents.” (An early noun sense of germane also referred specifically to children of the same parents.) Today, something said to be germane is figuratively “related” in that it is relevant or fitting to something else, as when music critic Amanda Petrusich wrote of an album by the Chicks: “‘Gaslighter’ is brasher and more pop-oriented than anything the band has done before. Part of this shift feels germane to our era—the idea of genre, as it applies to contemporary music, is growing less and less relevant—but it also feels like a final repudiation of country music, and of a community that mostly failed to support or to understand one of its biggest acts.”
Synonyms
Examples of germane in a Sentence
Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, 3 Feb. 2003
Bork and his supporters argued that his "academic" writings and his speeches were not germane to whether he should be confirmed.
—Elizabeth Drew, New Yorker, 2 Nov. 1987
From time to time, engineers and scientists hold conferences … where they trot out ideas they have developed, frequently ideas germane to solving practical problems.
—Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, (1984) 1985
facts germane to the dispute
my personal opinion isn't germane to our discussion of the facts of the case
Jim Cramer, CNBC, 27 Oct. 2024
Those day-to-day issues are not just germane to Blacks, but everyone, Lewis said.
—La Risa R. Lynch, Journal Sentinel, 23 Oct. 2024
The psychological elements in Trump’s pitch for tariffs are highly germane, and apparently effective.
—Hersh Shefrin, Forbes, 30 Sep. 2024
In that case, Montana legislators had attached a rider, an amendment that is not germane to a bill, to the National Defense Authorization Act that was signed in December 2019.
—Devan Patel, The Mercury News, 9 Aug. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Germane.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/germane. Accessed 28 Nov. 2024.
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germane
adjective
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