Seeing your team crash out of a tournament, getting a last-minute request at the end of a long working day… life tends to be full of those little frustrations, and sometimes you need an outlet.

That’s why this handy mono-syllabic word is one that’s well worth adding to your vocabulary.

What does it mean?

As you might be able to guess, der Frust (pronounced like this) means frustration or exasperation: that awful feeling of being thwarted in everything you do.

It’s an emotion you might feel if your laptop dies before you manage to save a full day’s work, or if you get to the train station half an hour early just to find out the train is two hours late. 

As well as sounding a lot like the start of the English word frustration, Frust can also be used in a sentence in much the same way. If you want to vent your emotions or let off some steam, for example, you might say, ‘Ich muss meinen Frust auslassen’, or, ‘I have to let out my frustration’.

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Incidentally, you can also describe yourself as ‘frustriert’, just like the English ‘frustrated’. 

There’s also a fun and slightly more colloquial way to use Frust. In this informal use, you can turn the noun into an adjective and use it to describe anything that’s annoying you at present. 

For example, you could say, ‘Mein Arbeitstag war total Frust’ to express what an irritating day you had at the office. This can roughly be translated in English as saying, ‘My work day was a total drag.’

Use it like this:

Ich lasse niemals meinen Frust an anderen aus.

I never take out my frustration on other people. 

Ich kann deinen Frust verstehen, aber ich kann ja nichts dafür. 

I can understand your frustration, but it’s not my responsibility.