12 Untranslatable Words That Will Change How You See the World
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Some feelings are so specific that English never bothered to name them. But other languages did — and each of these words is a window into how a different culture sees the world.
Emotions with no English name
Some emotional experiences are universal. What differs is whether a culture thought they were important enough to capture in a single word.
Saudade (Portuguese, pronounced sow-dahd)
Say you left home ten years ago. You have built a new life, new friends, new routines. But sometimes, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, a wave of feeling hits — not quite sadness, not quite nostalgia, but a deep, aching awareness of someone or something forever absent.
That is saudade.
Portuguese culture has elevated this emotion to an art form. It is the central theme of fado music, where singers pour this very feeling into lyrics about lost sailors, departed lovers, and unreachable homelands. The 17th-century Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo described it as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”
English needs a full paragraph to describe what Portuguese does in seven letters.
Gigil (Tagalog)
You see a chubby-cheeked baby. Or a fluffy kitten with oversized paws. Something wells up inside — an overwhelming urge to clench your hands, grit your teeth, and squeeze.
Filipinos have a name for this: gigil (pronounced ghee-gill).
It is the strange, paradoxical feeling provoked by overwhelming cuteness — so intense it becomes almost physical. Unlike saudade, which has been in Portuguese for centuries, gigil only entered the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2025, alongside ten other Filipino words like kababayan and lumpia.
OED executive editor Danica Salazar explained the logic: when bilingual speakers borrow a word often enough to fill a “lexical gap” in English, it earns its place in the dictionary. Gigil filled a gap English speakers did not even realize existed.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic)
“May you bury me.”
That is the literal translation of the Arabic phrase ya’aburnee (يقبرني). It sounds morbid — until you understand the sentiment behind it.
It is a declaration of love so intense that you hope to die before the other person, because you cannot bear the thought of living without them. A parent might say it to a child. A lover might whisper it to their partner.
English has “I would die for you,” but that is about sacrifice. Ya’aburnee is about something quieter: the simple, terrifying acknowledgment that someone else’s absence would make your own life unbearable.
The world around us
Some languages pay extraordinary attention to the physical world — naming phenomena that English speakers experience but never thought to label.
Komorebi (Japanese)
Walk into a forest on a sunny afternoon. Look up. The light does not just pass through the canopy — it dances. It breaks into shifting patterns, flickering between branches, painting the ground with shadows that move with every breeze.
Japanese captures this in one word: komorebi (木漏れ日).
The three characters break down literally as tree (木) + leak through (漏れ) + sunlight (日). But the sum is greater than its parts. Komorebi is not just the light itself — it is the awareness of its impermanence, the quiet recognition that the pattern you are watching right now will never appear exactly the same way again.
This is deeply tied to the Japanese concept of mono no aware — the bittersweet appreciation of transient beauty. A culture that names the way light falls through leaves is a culture that has trained itself to notice the small, fleeting moments most people walk past every day.
Hygge (Danish)
Denmark consistently ranks among the happiest countries on Earth. Ask a Dane why, and they will likely mention hygge (pronounced hoo-gah).
Hygge is the art of creating warmth, comfort, and intimacy — candles flickering on a dark winter evening, thick socks and a hot drink, close friends laughing around a table with no agenda and no phones. It is not about grand gestures or expensive settings. Quite the opposite: hygge is about finding deep satisfaction in the simple, the modest, the present moment.
The word became so influential that both the Oxford Dictionary and Collins Dictionary named it a word of the year in 2016. It sparked a wave of books, lifestyle articles, and even interior design trends. But at its core, hygge is not something you buy — it is something you cultivate.
The fact that Danish needed a dedicated noun for this tells you something about what that culture values.
Fernweh (German)
Everyone knows wanderlust — the desire to travel. But German has a sharper, more urgent word: fernweh (fern = far, weh = ache or pain).
It is literally “distance sickness,” the opposite of homesickness. Where wanderlust is a pleasant daydream about future adventures, fernweh is an actual ache — a painful awareness that there are places in the world you have not yet seen, and the clock is ticking.
If you have ever scrolled through photos of a faraway landscape and felt a physical tug in your chest, you have felt fernweh. English borrowed wanderlust but never got around to borrowing fernweh. Maybe because it hurts a little more to admit.
The art of being together
Social connection looks different in every culture. These words reveal how societies carve out space for togetherness — and the specific flavors of connection they value most.
Sobremesa (Spanish)
In Spain, a meal does not end when the plates are cleared. It continues into sobremesa — the unhurried time spent lingering at the table, talking, laughing, and digesting together.
Sobremesa has no agenda. No one is checking their watch. The conversation drifts from politics to family gossip to philosophy and back again. Coffee cups empty and refill. This is not “wasting time” in the Spanish view — it is the whole point of sharing a meal in the first place.
The word literally means “over the table” (sobre = over, mesa = table), and it reflects a cultural priority that many visitors to Spain notice immediately: relationships matter more than schedules. English has no word for this because the activity itself has been squeezed out by faster meals and busier calendars.
Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese, pronounced kah-foo-neh)
Some of the most intimate human gestures have no name in English. Cafuné is one of them: the act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.
It is not romantic in the dramatic sense. It is quieter than that — the kind of touch shared between a parent and child, or between partners on a lazy Sunday morning. It says I am here, you are safe, you are loved without a single word.
The word likely traces back to the Kimbundu language of Angola, carried to Brazil through the transatlantic diaspora. Cafuné is a reminder that some of the most important things we do for each other have no English label — not because they do not happen, but because nobody thought to name them.
Hiraeth (Welsh, pronounced hee-ryeth)
Hiraeth is often translated as “homesickness,” but that barely scratches the surface.
It is a deep, bittersweet longing for a home that may no longer exist — or may never have existed at all. It carries a sense of grief and loss, a mourning for something irretrievable. You can feel hiraeth for a childhood home demolished decades ago, for a landscape you only know through your grandmother’s stories, for a version of your country that was erased by time.
The Welsh hold onto this word tightly, and for good reason. Welsh itself nearly disappeared under centuries of English pressure, and its revival is one of the most remarkable language comeback stories in Europe. Hiraeth captures what that near-loss felt like in a way no English word can.
For more words that capture similarly specific cultural emotions, see our full list of 50 untranslatable words from over 25 languages.
Spirit and creativity
The final three words are about how we pour ourselves into what we do — creating with soul, solving problems with ingenuity, and finding reasons to keep going.
Meraki (Greek, pronounced meh-rah-kee)
Some people do their work and go home. Others leave a piece of themselves in everything they make.
Greek has a word for this second approach: meraki (μεράκι). It means doing something with soul, creativity, and love — putting something of yourself into your work. A cook who tastes every dish before it leaves the kitchen. A carpenter who sands the underside of a table that no one will ever see. A writer who rewrites a single sentence ten times because it still “does not feel right.”
Meraki comes from the Turkish merak, meaning “curiosity” or “passion,” but Greek speakers transformed it into something deeper. It is not about perfectionism or showing off. It is about the quiet pride of knowing you gave something your full self.
In a world of automation, shortcuts, and AI-generated drafts, meraki is the thing a machine cannot fake.
Jugaad (Hindi)
Your car breaks down on a rural road. You have no tools, no mechanic in sight. But you notice a piece of wire, some tape in the glove box, and a bent spoon. Twenty minutes later, you are back on the road.
That is jugaad — the art of creative, flexible problem-solving with whatever is available.
Jugaad is a mindset as much as a practice. In Hindi, it describes both the hack itself and the attitude behind it: a refusal to be stopped by a lack of resources. It is not about cutting corners dangerously. It is about finding a way when the “proper” way is not available.
Management theorists have even turned it into a business concept — “jugaad innovation” — describing how entrepreneurs in emerging markets build products with minimal resources. But for everyday Hindi speakers, jugaad is simply how life works. You make do, you improvise, you find a way.
Ikigai (Japanese, pronounced ee-kee-guy)
The Japanese island of Okinawa has one of the highest concentrations of centenarians on Earth. Researchers who studied their longevity kept hearing the same word: ikigai (生き甲斐).
It means “a reason for being” — what gets you out of bed in the morning. But ikigai is less about grand life missions and more about the small, daily things that make life feel worth living. Morning coffee with a loved one. Tending a garden. Teaching a skill to someone younger. The word combines iki (life) and gai (value, worth), and its roots trace back to the Heian period (794–1185), when shells were considered precious objects — so ikigai literally means “the value of living.”
Japanese psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, who popularized the term in her 1966 book On the Meaning of Life, made an important distinction: ikigai is tied to seikatsu (everyday life), not jinsei (one’s entire lifetime). It is not about finding one grand purpose. It is about accumulating enough small reasons to keep going.
Studies have linked having ikigai to lower mortality risk, reduced rates of heart disease and dementia, and up to seven extra years of life expectancy. Not bad for a word English never got around to inventing.
What these words teach us
Each of these twelve words is a small act of cultural attention. A society noticed something — a feeling, a light pattern, a social ritual, a creative impulse — and decided it was worth naming.
That is what makes them profoundly valuable. When you learn a word like komorebi or sobremesa, you are not just expanding your vocabulary. You are borrowing another culture’s way of seeing — and in doing so, noticing things in your own life that you might have walked right past.
Languages lose words too — and when a language disappears, its unique observations about what it means to be human disappear with it.
Tools like OpenL Translate can translate words between 100+ languages instantly — but some concepts resist even the best AI. That is not a limitation of technology. It is a reminder that language is not just information transfer. It is a record of what a culture decided was worth paying attention to.
Sources
- OED March 2025 Update: New Words From Around the World — official Oxford English Dictionary announcement of gigil and other “untranslatable” additions
- BBC News: Gigil, alamak among new words in Oxford English Dictionary — coverage of the OED March 2025 update
- The Guardian: 12 untranslatable words (and their translations) — David Shariatmadari on whether words are truly untranslatable
- MCIS Languages: 15 Untranslatable Words That Reveal Cultural Richness — detailed explanations of cultural context
- The School of Life: The Beauty of Komorebi — philosophical and cultural significance of the Japanese term
- BBC Bitesize: Hygge and Other Untranslatable Words — overview of hygge and related concepts
- Tokyo Weekender: Japanese Words We Can’t Translate — Komorebi — deeper look at komorebi in Japanese culture
- Chicago Botanic Garden: Komorebi and Nature and Wellness — komorebi as a wellness concept
- United Nations: International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032 — UN data on language endangerment
- Britannica: Fado — Portuguese Musical Tradition — context on saudade’s role in Portuguese music
- BBC News: Ikigai — The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life — BBC Worklife coverage of the ikigai concept and Okinawan longevity research
- Wikipedia: Ikigai — etymology, history, and Mieko Kamiya’s foundational 1966 work
