Meanings
plural gedankenexperiments · alternative gedanken experiment · alternative Gedanken experiment · alternative Gedankenexperiment
- thought experiment
So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores?
2005 January 6, Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, retrieved 04 Feb 20121 more example
John told her about his dissertation, about the equations he had concocted from a gedanken experiment. "What's a gedanken experiment?" she asked him. / "It's where you just think an experiment, but you don't actually do it, you just think it through," he told her.
2005 Aug, Eugene Mirabelli, “The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations”, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, volume 109, number 2, page 143
Origin
- GermanGedankenexperiment“thought experiment”
- Englishgedankenexperiment
From German Gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment”), from Gedanke (“thought”) + Experiment (“experiment”).
More words from German
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
gedankenexperiment. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gedankenexperiment
“gedankenexperiment.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gedankenexperiment. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “gedankenexperiment,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gedankenexperiment.
Source: gedankenexperiment on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.