Doppelgänger or Doppelganger: Does English Keep the Umlaut?

In brief: write doppelgänger if your text keeps foreign marks, doppelganger if it does not. English took the German noun with its ä, and the plain doppelganger now stands beside it, in print and in the dictionaries. The dots win in the dictionaries, while the Guardian's and AP's house styles go without them.

Every row of the table was checked against its source on 2026-10-25. Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Britannica refused that check with HTTP 403, and a dictionary AccentPad cannot read is not cited.

Who coined Doppelgänger, and what did Jean Paul mean by it?

A German novelist, in 1796. The DWDS, the digital dictionary of the German language, prints Wolfgang Pfeifer's etymology: the word was first Doppeltgänger, with a t, and Jean Paul defined it in 1796 as the name for people who see themselves. Wiktionary places the coinage in his novel Siebenkäs, a title with an ä of its own.

The shorter form won. Pfeifer notes that compounds of doppelt drop the t, like Doppeldecker and Doppelpunkt, and he dates Doppelgänger, a person mistaken for another, to the 19th century. English took the word soon after: Dictionary.com records it first in 1850–55.

The parts are plain German. The American Heritage Dictionary splits the word into doppel, double, which German borrowed from French double, and Gänger, goer, from Gang, a going. Gang has a plain a; the goer, Gänger, has the ä.

Neighbouring languages translated the word instead of borrowing it. Wiktionary lists Danish dobbeltgænger, with æ, Dutch dubbelganger and Swedish dubbelgångare, with å, as calques: double-goer in each language's own words.

Doppelganger or doppleganger: where does the l go?

After the e, as in double. Wiktionary labels doppleganger a misspelling of doppelganger, and Dictionary.com, asked for doppleganger, shows its entry doubleganger instead and offers to search for the typed form.

The mistake moves one letter. Doppel is German for double, from French double in the American Heritage etymology, so it ends the way double does, in -el. Spell the first half dop-pel, then add ganger, the goer.

Doubleganger, the result Dictionary.com shows, is a real English word: it defines it as doppelgänger, and Wiktionary lists it beside double as a synonym. It is the English calque of the German word, the way dubbelganger is the Dutch one.

Gang or geng: what does the ä change in how doppelganger is said?

The vowel of the third syllable. Duden gives the German pronunciation as [ˈdɔpl̩ɡɛŋɐ]: with the dots, that syllable has the open e sound [ɛ], not an a.

English dictionaries record both habits:

• The American Heritage Dictionary writes dŏpəl-găng′ər first and -gĕng′- second. Its guide uses the same marks in bat, băt, and went, wĕnt.
• Dictionary.com respells the American forms dop-uhl-gang-er and daw-puhl-geng-er.
• For British English, Oxford's learner's dictionary prints /ˈdɒplɡæŋə(r)/ and /ˈdɒplɡeŋə(r)/.
• Collins, on the same Dictionary.com page, has only the e: /ˈdɒpəlˌɡɛŋə/.

The geng forms keep the German ä. The gang forms read the letter as an English a, which is what the plain spelling doppelganger shows a reader. So the dots are a hint about sound as well as a mark of origin, and dropping them leaves only the gang reading on the page.

Ghost, lookalike or evil twin: what does doppelganger mean now?

Today it means mostly a lookalike: someone who is not your twin but could pass for you. That is the doppelganger meaning most readers want, and the dictionaries put the older one first.

First in the American Heritage entry comes a ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart; its second is either of two people who look very much alike. A note from Vocabulary.com on the Dictionary.com page says the word was originally a kind of ghost and that most people now use it for someone who looks a lot like them.

Wiktionary adds two senses of its own: an evil twin, and in fantasy fiction a monster that takes the forms of people, usually after killing them. Its quotations show both spellings in print: Naomi Klein's 2023 book Doppelganger has no dots, while R. F. Kuang's novel Babel, from 2022, writes doppelgänger.

German keeps the narrower doppelganger definition. Duden defines Doppelgänger only as a male person who looks confusingly like another person, with no ghost in it, and Doppelgängerin is the female form. The folklore survives in the DWDS examples: one, from Lutz Röhrich's lexicon of German sayings, says the double usually means approaching death, and sometimes announces it itself.

Why does German write Doppelgänger with a capital D, and what is its plural?

Because it is a noun, and German capitalises every noun. Duden's rules put it in one line: Substantive schreibt man groß, nouns are written with a capital letter, under paragraph 55 of the official rules. Dictionary.com lists the capitalised Doppelgänger after “Or” beneath its lower-case headword, so the German form is accepted in English too.

The plural differs between the languages:

• German: der Doppelgänger, plural die Doppelgänger, the same word, as Duden and the DWDS give it.
• German feminine: die Doppelgängerin, which Duden and Wiktionary list.
• English with the dots: doppelgängers, the plural Dictionary.com prints.
• English without them: doppelgangers, Wiktionary's plural for the lemma doppelganger.

German also builds on the word: the DWDS lists Doppelgängerei and Doppelgängertum among the compounds that start with it, and Wiktionary gives Einzelgänger, with the same Gänger, as a related term. None of the English dictionaries consulted here gives a feminine form: the American Heritage Dictionary defines the lookalike as either of two people, and the Oxford entries as another person.

Doppelganger or doppelgaenger: what replaces the dots?

In English, nothing: the dots go and the a stays, which is how doppelganger came about. German has another habit. Duden's own address for the entry ends in Doppelgaenger, with ae in place of ä.

Wiktionary confirms the German habit while telling Finnish writers to do the opposite. Under technical restrictions, its note says, Finnish ä should be written a, “not ae, as in German”.

So doppelgaenger is a German workaround and not an English spelling: none of the English dictionaries in the table lists it. If you cannot type the ä, write doppelganger, the form the American Heritage Dictionary and the Guardian already accept.

Wiktionary's Swedish section on ä gives the background: the letter began as a ligature of a and e, was written in the 16th century as an a with a small e above it, and took its two dots in the early 18th century. The a with umlaut page lists the languages that write ä, and the umlaut page covers the mark on every letter.