Untranslatable words: 14 feelings English has no word for
Updated October 31, 2026
Some feelings are so specific that one language has a single word for them while another needs a whole sentence. These words are often called untranslatable: you can explain them, but not swap them for one word.
Here are fourteen of our favourites, from Portuguese to Turkish, with what they mean and why they are hard to translate.
14 untranslatable words
1.SaudadePortuguese
A deep, bittersweet longing for someone or something that is absent, and may never come back. It holds love and loss at the same time.
2.HyggeDanish
The warm, unhurried comfort of being with people you like: candles, a blanket, a long evening that asks nothing of you.
3.FernwehGerman
Longing for far-off places, even ones you have never been. The opposite of homesickness.
4.WaldeinsamkeitGerman
The feeling of being alone in a forest: quiet, a little lonely, and somehow connected to everything.
5.KomorebiJapanese
Sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees.
6.TsundokuJapanese
Buying books and letting them pile up, unread. Most readers know it well.
7.SobremesaSpanish
The time spent talking at the table after a meal, when the plates are empty but nobody wants to leave.
8.MamihlapinatapaiYaghan
A look shared between two people, each hoping the other will start something that both want but neither will begin.
9.GigilFilipino
The urge to squeeze or pinch something unbearably cute.
10.CafunéBrazilian Portuguese
Tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair.
11.LagomSwedish
Not too much, not too little: just the right amount.
12.GurbetTurkish
Being far from home, in a place that is not yours, and the ache that comes with it.
13.YakamozTurkish
The shimmer of moonlight, or of glowing plankton, on the sea at night.
14.KeyifTurkish
Quiet, unhurried pleasure in the moment: tea, a view, nowhere to be.
Why some feelings have no word
Languages name what their speakers talk about often. A culture that spends long winters indoors finds a word for cosy togetherness; a seafaring one finds a word for the people who left. Nobody sat down and decided it: a phrase got used so often that it became a single word.
That is also why your own life is full of feelings that have no word in any language: the way one person laughs, the silence on a particular Sunday morning, the joke only your family understands. They are too personal for a dictionary to have noticed.
Every word was new once
English is full of words that someone simply made up. Horace Walpole coined “serendipity” in a letter in 1754. Lewis Carroll invented “chortle” in 1871, and people have been chortling ever since. A word becomes real when someone gives it a meaning and other people understand it.
Coin a word for your own feeling
That is what A Word For does. You describe the feeling, the moment or the person in your own words. We suggest five brand-new, easy-to-say words, check each one in dictionaries in 16 languages and on the web, and record the one you choose to you in a public online dictionary, with its own page and certificate.
Two examples we coined to show how it works: marsuvel, “the urge to reread the last message from someone you miss”, and vorelune, “missing a place you have never been”. Yours will be made for a feeling only you can describe.