Beamer

What it means

1. 1.

   A video projector — the thing on the ceiling of a meeting room. Entirely ordinary German, and entirely opaque to English speakers, for whom a Beemer is a BMW.

2. 2.

   The German for the car is simply BMW, pronounced bay-em-VAY. The overlap catches out German speakers abroad about as often as it catches out English speakers in Germany.

Examples with translations

• Kannst du den Beamer anschließen?

  Can you hook up the projector?

• Der Beamer im Konferenzraum ist kaputt.

  The projector in the meeting room is broken.

Where it comes from

Built in German from the English verb 'beam' plus the agent suffix, in the same 1990s office-equipment wave that produced Handy. English has no such noun for a projector, so it is a German invention using English parts, not a borrowing.

First attested: 1990s