Nederlands oefenen met vragen over tijd en bezoek

What does “geleden” mean in Dutch?

To say “ago” in Dutch you use geleden: “vijf minuten geleden” (five minutes ago), “een uur geleden” (an hour ago), “drie jaar geleden” (three years ago). Put any time span in front of it and you’re done. The surprising detail: “geleden” comes from an old form of “lijden” that originally meant “to go” or “to pass” — not “to suffer.” So “vijf minuten geleden” really means “five minutes having passed” — a frozen piece of very old Dutch.

In the clip, the question is “Hoe laat ben je thuis gekomen?” (What time did you come home?) and the answer is “Ik ben vijf minuten geleden aangekomen” (I arrived five minutes ago). Word order keeps “geleden” at the end of its time phrase: “een uur geleden,” never “geleden een uur.” The root “lijden” today almost always means “to suffer,” but the older “to pass/travel” sense survives only here, in time expressions. A related word: “overlijden” means to pass away or die — there the “passing” sense is still visible. The root goes back to Proto-Germanic *līþaną (to go, travel); as the word narrowed in modern Dutch to mean “suffer,” the time-expression “geleden” kept the original sense frozen in place.