DINKELSBÜHL, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the Wörnitz, 16 m. N. from Nördlingen, on the railway to Dombühl. Pop. 5000. It is an interesting medieval town, still surrounded by old walls and towers, and has an Evangelical and two Roman Catholic churches. Notable is the so-called Deutsches Haus, the ancestral home of the counts of Drechsel-Deufstetten, a fine specimen of the German renaissance style of wooden architecture. There are a Latin and industrial school, several benevolent institutions, and a monument to Christoph von Schmid (1768–1854), a writer of stories for the young. The inhabitants carry on the manufacture of brushes, gloves, stockings and gingerbread, and deal largely in cattle.
Fortified by the emperor Henry I., Dinkelsbühl received in 1305 the same municipal rights as Ulm, and obtained in 1351 the position of a free imperial city, which it retained till 1802, when it passed to Bavaria. Its municipal code, the Dinkelsbuhler Recht, published in 1536, and revised in 1738, contained a very extensive collection of public and private laws.