Luftmensch
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 One more concerned with airy intellectual pursuits than practical matters like earning an income.
"My wife is such a luftmensch she missed our anniversary dinner because she was too busy reading her books!"
- 2 a beggar, petty trader, peddler, and various types of paupers
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"My wife is such a luftmensch she missed our anniversary dinner because she was too busy reading her books!"
Etymology
From Yiddish לופֿטמענטש (luftmentsh), from לופֿט (luft, “air”) + מענטש (mentsh, “person”). Compare German von Luft und Liebe leben (“to disregard the practical matters of life”, literally “to live on air and love”), German Luftikus (“impractical, quixotic, or careless person”). The word first appeared in Yiddish literature in 1860s (Nicolas Vallois, "The Luftmentsh as an economic metaphor for Jewish poverty: a rhetorical analysis").
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.