Does “Rathaus” really mean “house of rats” in German?

Rathaus looks like it should mean “rat house,” but the Rat here has nothing to do with rodents. It comes from an old Germanic word for “council” or “counsel” — the same root behind Ratschlag (advice) and the verb raten (to advise). A Rathaus is literally a “council house”: the building where a city’s governing council meets.

Ratte (the animal) and Rat (council/advice) come from completely unrelated word families — the overlap in spelling is coincidence, not shared history. In this clip, a quiz-taker names one German-speaking city’s Rathaus after another (Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Bern), a reminder that almost every town, however small, has its own named Rathaus at its center.