The stock exchange and securities

One word on this list leads three lives, and a reader who meets it in the financial pages has usually met it somewhere else first. Verwässern is to add too much water: der Wein ist verwässert. In politics it is what happens to a bill between draft and vote — ein verwässertes Gesetz has been weakened until it barely does what it promised. On the stock exchange die Verwässerung is what a capital increase does to the shareholders who do not take part: the company is cut into more shares, and each old share stands for a smaller part of it. English says watered down for the wine and the bill and switches to dilution for the shares; German keeps one word, and the wine is never quite gone from the other two. Das Bezugsrecht exists to prevent exactly this: it lets existing holders buy enough of the new shares to keep their slice.