What Does 'Sennheiser' Actually Mean?

The audio brand known as Sennheiser has been around since 1945, creating its first microphone out of a small farmhouse in Germany some 80 years ago. Since then, the company has become well-known for releasing high-quality audio products. In particular, many of their headphones over the years have been consistently praised by the audiophile community.

Considering that Sennheiser was founded in Germany all those years ago, you might expect its name to have some sort of meaning in its native German language. But Sennheiser doesn't actually translate into or even mean anything in modern German.

If you punch in the brand's name into a German dictionary, you won't come away with any results. This is because Sennheiser has no meaning outside of simply being the surname of the company's founder, Fritz Sennheiser. In fact, Sennheiser wasn't always the name the company went by. Originally founded as Laboratorium Wennebostel (Labor W), the company would later change its name to Sennheiser in 1958.

A surname like Sennheiser hasn't always been as common as one might think. All surnames came into being as human populations expanded. A town might have only a few Johnathans, but in a big city this would start to become a problem. Thus, the creation of the surname was a way to help differentiate people. And many early surnames simply adopted the jobs that people did.

For its part, the German language took up surnames around the 1100s. And like English, they commonly took up occupational surnames. The word Senne often refers to a location where milk products are made, or a dairy farm on a mountain. A man who works at a Senne would then be called a Senn. This would suggest that the Sennheiser name could trace its roots to dairy farm work.

This is interesting when you consider that Sennheiser got its start in a farmhouse, one that is still a part of Sennheiser's headquarters. If you ever find yourself in Germany, you can actually request a tour of that very farmhouse to experience a piece of audiophile history. You might even be lucky enough to see the incredibly rare Sennheiser HE-90 Orpheus headphones while you're there.