Untranslatable Words

Untranslatable Words: Every language names feelings that others can only describe in a sentence; researchers now collect these words because having a name for an emotion can help people notice and experience it more clearly.

Saudade: The Portuguese word for a longing for something or someone absent that may never return is so central to the culture that Brazil marks a Day of Saudade every January 30.

Hygge: The Danish word for cozy, candlelit togetherness became a global lifestyle trend and made the Collins Dictionary word of the year shortlist in 2016.

Schadenfreude: German for pleasure at someone else's misfortune; a 2009 brain imaging study found it activates the brain's reward center, especially when the unlucky person was someone we envied.

Mamihlapinatapai: A word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego for a look shared between two people who each want the other to act first; Guinness once listed it as the most succinct word.

Wabi-sabi: This Japanese idea finds beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete, like a cracked tea bowl, and it shaped centuries of Japanese design.

Komorebi: Japanese for sunlight filtering through leaves; Wim Wenders' 2023 film 'Perfect Days' closes by defining the word on screen.

Sisu: The Finnish word for stubborn courage in impossible odds became internationally famous in 1940, when Time magazine used it to explain how Finland held off the Soviet Union in the Winter War.

Ubuntu: The Nguni word, often summed up as 'I am because we are,' was championed by Desmond Tutu and later became the name of a popular free computer operating system.

Tsundoku: The Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up unread dates back to the late 1800s and began as a pun on 'pile up and leave' and 'reading.'

Hiraeth: The Welsh word for homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that may never have existed, has close cousins in Cornish and Breton.

Toska: Vladimir Nabokov wrote that no single English word renders all the shades of this Russian feeling, ranging from dull restlessness to great spiritual anguish.

Litost: Milan Kundera called this Czech word a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery, and argued non Czechs could barely grasp it.

Gezellig: The Dutch word for the warm feeling of being with people you like in a comfortable place comes from 'gezel,' meaning companion.

Lagom: The Swedish word for 'just the right amount' is often linked to a Viking tradition of passing a drinking horn around the group, a charming story linguists consider a myth.

Ikigai: The Japanese word for a reason for being is tied to long lived Okinawa, but the famous four circle Venn diagram of ikigai was created by a Western blogger in 2014.

Mono no aware: The 18th century scholar Motoori Norinaga used this phrase, a gentle sadness at the passing of things, to explain the emotional core of 'The Tale of Genji.'

Fernweh: German for an ache to be somewhere far away, it is the mirror image of Heimweh, homesickness.

Han: This Korean word for deep, collective sorrow and unresolved longing is often described as a defining emotion of Korean culture and appears throughout its film and literature.

Duende: In a famous 1933 lecture, poet Federico Garcia Lorca described duende as the dark, raw power that makes flamenco and great art give you shivers.

Kummerspeck: The German word for weight gained from emotional overeating translates literally as 'grief bacon.'

Iktsuarpok: An Inuit word for the anticipation that makes you keep going outside to check whether someone is coming.

Sehnsucht: C. S. Lewis described this German word for an intense, inconsolable longing for something you cannot name as one of the central experiences of his life.

Waldeinsamkeit: German for the feeling of being alone in the woods, it inspired a whole poem of that name by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1858.

Tim Lomas: The psychologist has built a lexicography of well being with well over 1,000 untranslatable words about positive feelings, arguing that learning them can expand our emotional range.