Erhöll

Erhöll is an archaic inflected form of the German verb erhören, found in older texts such as Middle High German and Early New High German. It is not a separate lexical item in modern standard German; rather, it represents a historical simple past form used in literary or formal language. In contemporary usage, the equivalent forms would be erhörte (preterite) or hat erhört (present perfect). The verb erhören generally means to hear or listen to something, and in many contexts it carries the additional sense of granting a petition or plea after hearing it, especially in religious, royal, or ceremonial language.

In historical prose and poetry, erhöll may appear to convey that a petition was literally heard and, more importantly, granted by an authority such as a king, a god, or a higher power. The sense can be either simply “heard” in a physical or auditory sense or “granted” in the sense of satisfying a request, depending on context. The umlauted spelling and the preterite form reflect older orthographic conventions and phonetic patterns that later shifted in modern German spelling.

Today, readers encountering erhöll are typically reading historical or stylistically marked texts. Modern German favors forms like erhört or erhörte for the present perfect and simple past respectively, while the broader verb family remains erhören, with the meaning centered on listening to and potentially granting petitions.

See also: erhören; German verb conjugation; archaic German orthography.