Reich

The German word Reich travels a path that will feel at once familiar and strange to an English speaker. Our own word "rich" is its direct cousin, from the same ancient ancestor meaning "to rule" or "to direct." Both words started with power and ended up with money, a common enough story. But where English largely stopped there, letting other words like "kingdom" or "empire" take over the idea of a ruler's domain, German kept building. The root Reich blossomed into a whole landscape of words describing realms of all kinds, from the physical to the abstract. So a king has his Reich, but so does a university professor, whose Fachbereich is their specialized field, their little kingdom of knowledge. A government agency has its Zuständigkeitsbereich, its specific dominion of responsibility. What German does is take the logic of a kingdom—a defined space where a certain power holds sway—and apply it everywhere. It builds a Machtbereich (a sphere of power) or a Wirkungsbereich (a sphere of effect) with the same linguistic tool it uses for a monarch's territory. This is a very German way of thinking: find a good, strong root and see how many different structures you can build with it.