While listening to Deutschlandradio this morning one word that kept on coming up and that I didn’t understand was Stockung. It appears mainly in traffic reports, so I assume it meant something like delays or traffic jams.
According to Reverso, Stockung means:
– interruption, hold-up; congestion, traffic jam, hold-up
– breakdown (in negotiations)
– slackening or dropping off (in trade/business)
– break, lull (in speech); pause, hesitation
– thickening; curdling (of milk)
Related expressions include:
– Verkehrsstockung = traffic jam
– der Verkehr läuft wieder ohne Stockungen = traffic is flowing smoothly again
A related verb is stocken, which means: to miss or skip a beat; to falter; to make no progress; to flag; to grind to a halt; to stagnate; to be held up or halted; to thicken; to curdle, to go sour; to become mildewed, to go mouldy/moldy.
Stockung and Stocken come from Stock (stick), which comes from the Old High German stoc, from the Proto-Germanic *Stukka (floor, beam, tree stump), from the Proto-Indo-European *(s)teu- (to push, stick, knock, beat), which is also the root of the English words stick and stock [source].
What are traffic jams / hold-ups called in your country?
