Wessi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wessi ("westerner") is the informal name that people in Germany call citizens of West Germany before re-unification. The counterpart for citizens of the former German Democratic Republic is Ossi. These names represent the decisive differences of the culture of the two German nations. While some people in Germany may consider these names insulting most people just regard them as part of the German culture.

There is also the name Besser-Wessi (besser meaning "better") which is a play on Besserwisser ("know-it-all") and has quite a similar meaning. East Germans used it when they felt West Germans didn't give proper respect to their achievements and way of life, feeling assimilated rather than united.

This page has been transwikied to Wiktionary.

Because this article has content useful to Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary, it has been copied to there, and its dictionary counterpart can be found at either Wiktionary:Transwiki:Wessi or Wiktionary:Wessi. It should no longer appear in Category:Copy to Wiktionary and should not be re-added there.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and if this article cannot be expanded beyond a dictionary definition, it should be tagged for deletion. If it can be expanded into an article, please do so and remove this template.
Note that {{vocab-stub}} is deprecated. If {{vocab-stub}} was removed when this article was transwikied, and the article is deemed encyclopedic, there should be a more suitable category for it.

In other languages