An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/kacken

by Friedrich Kluge

kacken, verb, ‘to cack, go to stool,’ early Modern High German only. Probably coined by schoolboys and students by affixing a German termination to Latin-Greek caccare (κακκᾶν; allied to κακός?. Compare Middle High German quât, ‘evil, bad, dirt’); the Old Teutonic words are scheißen and dialectic drißen. In Slavonic too there are terms similar in sound, Bohemian kakati, Polish kakác. The primitive kinship of the German word, however, with Greek, Latin, and Slavonic is inconceivable, because the initial k in the latter would appear as h in Teutonic.