The holiday season is in full swing, making it the perfect time to practice talking about giving in German. If you look up the German word for to give, however, you may get several translations. Read on to find out the differences between these German words for giving.

1. schenken

This verb means to give and is always used to talk about giving gifts. If a pronoun (he, she, it, they, etc.) is used for the recipient of the gift, it is always in the dative form. Be sure to conjugate schenken properly, depending on who is the giver. Read more about that in my blog about conjugating German verbs.

[Giver] + [schenken] + [Recipient] + [Gift]

Ich schenke dir ein Buch.

I give you a book.

2. verschenken

This is a dressed-up version of schenken with a slight difference in meaning. It is not usually used to talk about giving to a specific person, but rather to say you are giving something away as a gift.

A dative pronoun is not used with verschenken to indicate the recipient. Sentences with this verb tend to be vaguer.

Ich verschenke ein Buch.

I am giving away a book.

3. geben

This German verb is an all-purpose version of the verb to give that can be used in most scenarios. It is not so good for gift giving though. If you were to take the verb from the previous example and insert geben instead (Ich gebe dir ein Buch.), it would sound more like you are physically handing a book to the person. Gift giving doesn’t come into the equation with geben.

One important thing to note when using geben, is that it is conjugated irregularly. The forms for er, sie, es, and du are different than one might expect. Check out the table below for details:

4. verteilen

German prefix ver combined with teilen translates to give out more in the sense of distribute. People will often say verteilen when they have been out distributing a lot of similar objects to groups of people. It can also be used to talk about the distribution of butter on toast or frosting on cake.

Ich habe heute Broschüren verteilt.

I handed out brochures today.

5. austeilen

When combined with prefix aus, German verb teilen translates directly as share out. English speakers usually say give out or hand out to mean the same thing. Just like hand out vs. give out vs. distribute, austeilen and verteilen basically mean the same thing. They just have slightly different flavors of meaning and can be used to spice up any sentence where you might want to say give out twice.

What gifts are you giving this holiday season? Tell us in German in the comments below.