schlemiel
Other forms: schlemiels
A schlemiel is a somewhat dopey, awkward person. You might angrily call your brother a schlemiel after he drops the cake you've spent all day making, stumbles, and sits on it.
Nothing every goes quite right for a schlemiel — he's the guy who never seems to get any good luck, and who's less than brilliant and not particularly graceful. A schlemiel in a movie is an object of fun, perfect for laughing at. In real life, it's pretty hard to be a schlemiel. The word schlemiel means "bungler" in Yiddish, from a character called Peter Schlemihl in a classic German fable.
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(Yiddish) a dolt who is a habitual bungler
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Vocabulary lists containing schlemiel
Yiddish is an amalgam of German, Russian, Hebrew and many other languages that has persevered even though the fate of the people who speak it has been consistently in danger for centuries. The fact that English, the most popular language on the planet, contains words that are recognizably derived from Yiddish is something of a linguistic miracle, considering many of the 13 million native speakers of Yiddish were wiped out during World War II. Many of these 15 words may be familiar, but the routes they took to get to English, and the literal meanings of many of them, are surprising. Here are 15 common English words derived from Yiddish.