Words That Don't Exist in English (But Absolutely Should)
English is a voracious language. Over fifteen centuries it has cheerfully mugged Latin, French, Norse, Hindi, Nahuatl, and dozens of others for their most useful words. Pyjamas came from Urdu. Shampoo from Hindi. Ketchup from Hokkien Chinese. Berserk from Old Norse. English has always been less a language than a magpie with a dictionary.
And yet, for all its acquisitiveness, English has some glaring gaps. There are human experiences — universal ones, felt by everyone reading this — that English simply has no word for. Other languages, however, got there first. What follows is a collection of words that describe something real, something you have almost certainly felt, and something that English, for all its million-word vocabulary, has stubbornly refused to name.
The Feelings We All Have But Can't Quite Say
Saudade (Portuguese)
If you had to choose one word from this list to adopt into English, many linguists would argue for saudade. It describes a melancholic, bittersweet longing — for a person, a place, a time, or even something you are not quite sure of. It is the feeling of missing something so deeply that the missing itself becomes a kind of pleasure.
The Portuguese have elevated saudade to something close to a national philosophy. It saturates their fado music, their literature, their relationship with a seafaring history full of long departures and uncertain returns. The Brazilian poet Renato Russo called it "love that remains" after the person has gone.
English gets close with "nostalgia," but nostalgia implies a specific memory. Saudade can be for something you never had — a life unlived, a road not taken.
Toska (Russian)
Vladimir Nabokov — a man who wrote masterfully in three languages — struggled to translate toska and eventually gave up trying in a single word. He wrote: "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause."
At its mildest, it is restlessness and longing. At its most acute, it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. The sky on a grey Tuesday afternoon when nothing is wrong but nothing feels right — that is toska.
Forelsket (Norwegian)
The Norwegians, perhaps because they spend a great deal of winter indoors with their thoughts, have developed a precise vocabulary for emotional states English glosses over. Forelsket is the overwhelming, almost painful euphoria of falling in love for the very first time — that specific once-in-a-lifetime dizzy rush before you know how it ends.
English has "falling in love," but that describes a process. Forelsket is a moment — a state of being so particular and fleeting that it seems right it has its own word.
The Social Situations We've All Lived Through
L'esprit de l'escalier (French)
Literally "the spirit of the staircase." It is the perfect comeback, the devastating retort, the exact right thing to say — that arrives in your mind only after you have already left the room and are halfway down the stairs.
The French philosopher Denis Diderot coined the term in 1778, which tells you that the experience of thinking of the ideal response about thirty seconds too late is not new, not unique to you, and apparently universal enough to warrant its own phrase in at least one major language.
Tartle (Scottish)
The small, specific panic of forgetting someone's name at the exact moment you are about to introduce them to someone else. The slight hesitation, the slightly too-long pause, the wild mental scrambling — that is a tartle, and the Scots were wise enough to name it.
Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan)
From the language of the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego, and reportedly one of the most succinct words in any language. It describes the look exchanged between two people who both want the same thing but are each hoping the other will be the one to initiate it.
You know this look. You have exchanged it across meeting room tables when someone needs to deliver bad news. You have exchanged it with a friend when the bill arrives. You have exchanged it with a stranger when a car is blocking both your paths and someone needs to back up. The Yaghan people had a word for it. We are still doing the look.
The Pleasures Nobody Talks About
Schadenfreude (German)
This one has almost made it into English — you will find it in most dictionaries now, still wearing its German coat. It means the small, guilty pleasure of watching someone else's misfortune, particularly when they probably had it coming.
The reason it never quite completes the transition to English is perhaps telling. Admitting you experience Schadenfreude requires admitting something slightly unflattering about yourself. The Germans, who also gave us Weltschmerz (world-weariness) and Verschlimmbessern (making something worse while trying to improve it), seem remarkably willing to name their less noble emotions directly.
Sobremesa (Spanish)
The time spent lingering at the table after a meal is finished — not because there is more food, but because the conversation is too good to end. The plates are cleared, the wine is low, and nobody wants to be the first to say right, shall we?
Sobremesa treats this not as wasted time but as one of life's genuine pleasures. The Spanish, and much of Latin America, have built it into the rhythm of daily life. English, with its insistence on productivity and its suspicion of anything that looks like dawdling, never quite got around to naming it.
Hygge (Danish/Norwegian)
Hygge has been aggressively marketed to English speakers in recent years via a wave of Scandinavian lifestyle books, but it resists clean translation because it is as much a feeling as a practice. It is the warm, contented coziness of being exactly where you want to be — candles lit, good company, weather doing its worst outside. It is comfort made deliberate.
The Danish rank consistently among the world's happiest populations, and hygge is frequently cited as part of the reason. They did not just discover the feeling — they named it, codified it, and built it into their culture as something worth protecting.
The Beautiful and the Strange
Mono no aware (Japanese)
Translated loosely as "the pathos of things," mono no aware is the bittersweet awareness that everything is impermanent — and the gentle sadness and appreciation that comes from that awareness. It is why the Japanese cherry blossom festival (hanami) is as melancholy as it is joyful: the blossoms are beautiful partly because they fall within a week.
The concept permeates Japanese aesthetics, from the spare rooms of traditional architecture to the cracked-and-repaired beauty of kintsugi pottery. Where Western culture tends to resist impermanence, mono no aware finds a kind of peace in it.
Fernweh (German)
The opposite of homesickness. Fernweh is an ache for far-off places — a longing for somewhere distant, somewhere you have never been, somewhere that exists mostly in your imagination as a place where things might be different. It is wanderlust with an edge of pain.
The Germans, having also invented Wanderlust (which English did steal), apparently needed a second word to capture the specific feeling that arises when travel is not possible and the horizon feels like a taunt.
Ya'aburnee (Arabic)
Perhaps the most extraordinary word on this list. Arabic has a phrase — ya'aburnee — that translates literally as "may you bury me." It is said to a person you love so deeply that you cannot bear to imagine a world without them, and would rather die first than outlive them.
It is an expression of love through a declaration of mortality. English says "I love you." Arabic says: I hope I go first.
A Final Thought
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." These words suggest the opposite is also true — that every language represents a different world, a different way of carving up human experience into nameable things.
The existence of saudade does not mean Portuguese speakers feel more longing than English speakers. It means they decided the feeling was important enough to give a home to. Every word on this list is an invitation to notice something you were already feeling, and to feel it a little more completely now that it has a name.
Some things really do get lost in translation — which is why Babelfish pairs instant translation in 14 languages with an archive of phrases answered and corrected by real speakers. Got a phrase a machine can't do justice? See how people answered it.