I have often found "DAS" is used For the English words in German. e.g.: das Display, das Pixel, das Hotspot... und so on.
Is this a general rule?
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Sign up to join this communityI have often found "DAS" is used For the English words in German. e.g.: das Display, das Pixel, das Hotspot... und so on.
Is this a general rule?
There is no rule. It all depends on how the foreign word infiltrated German.
When the word is just a snappy English term for a thing which already exists in German, it gets assigned the same gender:
shop ≙ der Laden ⇒ der Shop.
jet ≙ der Düsenjäger ⇒ der Jet. And now all other "jets" are also masculine in German.
airport ≙ der Flughafen ⇒ der Airport.
As the last component of compound words determines the gender in German, generalization leads to more obvious gender assignments:
port ≙ airport ⇒ der Port. And now all ports (network ports etc.) are masculine in German.
fashion ≙ die Mode ⇒ die Fashion.
party ≙ die Feier ⇒ die Party.
rallye ≙ die Wettfahrt ⇒ die Rallye.
sandwich ≙ das belegte Brot ⇒ das Sandwich.
backup ≙ das Sichern ⇒ das Backup.
There is no hard and fast rule. Quite often, if there is a similar word in German, or the word or parts of it can be translated into German, that article is used. That said, sometimes the gender remains unclear for some time, until usually one article wins out by way of public usage. There can even be regional differences (Austrian German has a slight bias towards das, but there certainly isn't any official rule.)
A general tip is that the article for nouns that derive from foreign languages (as well as nouns deriving from verbs, e.g.) is das.
However there are many exceptions so all these article tips are just useful for when you have to guess without consulting any linguist sources.