Good Luck

Glück auf

Miners are believers, because it's a good thing to have supernatural help in the dangerous underground workplace. Typical signs are the statues of Saint Barbara, the patron Saint of the miners, and the miners greeting. But miners are also superstitious, so rituals and wishing luck was important too. So a special term for wishing luck was appropriate.

The "good luck" is a tradition which originates from the German speaking central Europe. The German term is "Glück auf", which actually means two things. Auf sometimes means "up" or "upwards", so it wishes luck to return to the surface, to come back "up". Auf also means "open up" or "get wider", in this case it means have luck that your seam widens and contains more valuable ore. The idea for a greeting was adopted in all countries where German miners were employed for their knowledge, together with many other mining-related terms. Similar traditions from British miners, Cornish and Welsh for example, did the same. Nevertheless, in most countries it was reduced to a simple good luck in the local language, as the wordplay could not be translated.

Term	English	Language
Glück auf	lucky return/luck finding ore	Deutsch - German: DACH
Srečno	good luck	Slovenian
Eey Up / ayup / eyup	look out	English: North Midlands and South Yorkshire
Mi Duck	good luck	English: East Midlands
Iawn cont	good luck	Welsh
buona fortuna	good luck	Italiano - Italian
sretno	good luck	Hrvatski - Croatian
bonne chance	good luck	Français - French
buena suerte	good luck	Español - Spanish
boa sorte	good luck	Português - Portuguese
удачи	(udachi) good luck	русский - Russian
успех	(uspekh) good luck	Bulgarian
held og lykke	good luck	Danish
õnn kaasa	good luck	Estonian
onnea	congratulations	Suomeksi - Finnish
succes	good luck	Nederlands - Dutch
lykke til	good luck	Norsk - Norwegian
Strzec Boze	God protect	Polski - Polish
succes	success	Romanian
сретно	good luck	Serbian
jó szerencsét	good luck	Hungarian
chúc may mắn	good luck	Vietnamese
labu veiksmi	good luck	Latvian
lycka till	good luck	Swedish
veľa šťastia / Zdar Boh	good luck / Hello God	Slovak
iyi şanslar	good luck	Turkish
paç fat	good luck	Albanian
Zdař Búh	Hello God	Czech
سعيد	(saeid) happy	Arabic