Untranslatable Words: 14 Concepts in 12 Languages and Why They Resist Translation

Every traveller eventually meets a word that resists translation. A Japanese friend says komorebi while pointing at the leaf-filtered sun in a Kyoto temple courtyard, and English offers nothing precise back. A Brazilian host says saudade about a grandmother who passed away, and "nostalgia" feels small. The instinct is to call these words "untranslatable", but the more interesting question is whether any of them really are — and what travellers actually walk away with when they meet one.

This article works through 14 famously untranslatable words across 12 languages, explains the linguistic research behind them, and then circles back to the harder question: do these words encode genuinely different ways of seeing the world, or are they just stories we tell ourselves about other cultures? We cite the academic literature explicitly throughout.

1. What does "untranslatable" actually mean?

Anna Wierzbicka^¹ — the linguist most associated with the modern study of cultural keywords — has spent her career arguing that "untranslatable" is a misleading shorthand (Wierzbicka, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2014). She is right that no word is literally untranslatable, in the sense that we can always paraphrase. The useful question is narrower: does this word name a concept for which the target language has no single shorthand?

Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard developed the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) programme as a way to do this rigorously. They argue that all languages share a small inventory of semantic primes — about 65 concepts such as I, YOU, GOOD, BAD, KNOW, FEEL, BECAUSE, IF — and that every complex idea in every language can be paraphrased using these primes (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014; Goddard, 2008). The result is that no concept is literally inaccessible from another language. But many concepts that one language packages into a single word require a paragraph in another. That gap is what most people are pointing at when they say "untranslatable".

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) put the broader idea more provocatively: "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." A language is not just a labelling system over a shared external world. It is a way of chunking experience — and different languages chunk differently. A word that has no clean equivalent in another language is usually a sign of a chunk the other language does not bother to make.

2. Does language really shape thought?

The big background question for any essay on untranslatable words is the Sapir^³-Whorf^⁴ hypothesis: the claim that the structure of a language influences the thought patterns of its speakers (Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956). In its strongest form — language determines thought — the hypothesis is widely rejected today (Pinker, 1994). In its weaker form — language influences habitual thought — it has been gradually rehabilitated by careful experimental work over the past 30 years.

The most quoted demonstration comes from Lera Boroditsky^²'s work on time metaphors. English speakers tend to talk about time horizontally ("the future is ahead, the past is behind"), Mandarin speakers also use vertical metaphors (上 and 下). Boroditsky (2001) showed that Mandarin-English bilinguals were faster at vertical temporal judgements after Mandarin priming. Subsequent work has extended this to gender in nouns (Boroditsky, 2011), space in Guugu Yimithirr (Levinson, 2003), and colour in Russian, where the obligatory distinction between siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue) measurably speeds up colour discrimination across that boundary (Winawer et al., 2007).

A major recent body of work from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics goes further. Asifa Majid and colleagues (2004, 2018) have documented that languages differ systematically in how they encode the senses — smell, for instance, is highly elaborated in some languages and almost bare in others — and that these differences correlate with how speakers attend to those sensory channels. Studies of bilingual cognition show that the same person can think slightly differently depending on which language they are operating in (Athanasopoulos et al., 2015).

The picture that emerges from current cognitive science (Casasanto, 2008; Lupyan, 2012; Wolff & Holmes, 2011) is not a strong Whorfian one. It is better summarised as: language does not determine what you can think, but it does shape what you habitually attend to. Words like komorebi or saudade exist because their speech communities found those experiences worth naming. Speakers of other languages can recognise the feeling, often instantly. They just have not bothered to invent a shorthand.

That is the right frame for what follows. None of the words below are literally unreachable from English. But each one names a chunk of human experience that English has decided to leave un-named.

3. Words for feelings

🇵🇹 Saudade (Portuguese)

Saudade is the canonical untranslatable word — so much so that 1 Brazilian and Portuguese essayists have written entire books about it (Lourenço, 1999; Da Matta, 1995). The standard English glosses are "longing" or "nostalgia", and neither is right. Saudade is the feeling of missing something or someone present in the past, knowing that thing may or may not return — and finding the missing itself bittersweet rather than purely sad. The 16th-century court poet Duarte Nunes de Leão already described it as "a memory of something with a desire for it". Fado, the Portuguese musical tradition, is built on it.

Lomas (2016, 2018), in his large-scale lexicographic study of untranslatable words for well-being, classifies saudade as a "complex bittersweet emotion" — a category where translation is hardest because the closest English equivalents collapse positive and negative components that the source word holds together.

🇯🇵 木漏れ日 Komorebi (Japanese)

Literally "tree-leak-sun": the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees. The word is short enough to point at, and the experience is universal, which is part of why it is often the first untranslatable word people meet. It is a small clue to a much larger Japanese aesthetic vocabulary in which light, weather, and transient natural phenomena are named with specific precision (Saito, 2007; Parkes, 2011).

🇯🇵 物の哀れ Mono no aware (Japanese)

Often translated as "the pathos of things" — the gentle sadness felt when one registers the transience of everything. The literary critic Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) made it the central concept of his reading of The Tale of Genji. It is closely related to the Buddhist mujō (impermanence) and the cherry-blossom-falling aesthetic. Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (2007) places mono no aware in a wider Japanese tradition that finds beauty in transience and modesty rather than in permanence and grandeur. See our Japan country profile for the cultural backdrop.

🇩🇰 Hygge (Danish)

Pronounced "hoo-ga", hygge names a particular quality of social cosiness — candles, warm drinks, friends, deliberate slowness. Linguists trace it to an Old Norse verb meaning "to think" or "to consider", and from there to a sense of being inwardly settled (Niemeyer, 2009). The Danish embassy and the Danish tourist board have leaned into the word; Meik Wiking's The Little Book of Hygge (2016) made it a global export. Lomas's well-being lexicography (2018) places hygge alongside related Scandinavian terms (kos in Norwegian, mys in Swedish) that name a similar feeling.

🇸🇪 Lagom (Swedish)

"Not too much, not too little, just right." Lagom is often presented as a Scandinavian secret to balance, and its etymology — sometimes traced to the Old Norse phrase laget om, "around the team" (Akerblom, 2017) — is sometimes given a folk story about Viking drinking horns being passed evenly. Whatever the etymology, the concept is real. It captures a cultural preference for moderation, mutual restraint, and refusal to either show off or under-give. Hofstede's data on Sweden (Hofstede et al., 2010) align with the word's cultural weight.

🇫🇮 Sisu (Finnish)

Sisu is closest to "grit" in English but is older, denser, and culturally central. The Finnish psychologist Emilia Lahti has spent her career studying it (Lahti, 2014, 2019). She describes sisu as "embodied fortitude" — a reserve of energy that surfaces precisely at the point where you thought you had nothing left. The word predates by centuries the psychological literature on grit (Duckworth, 2016), but the constructs overlap. Sisu was used to describe the Finnish defence in the Winter War of 1939–40 and is woven into the country's self-understanding.

🇰🇷 한 Han (Korean)

Han is a collective, historical sorrow — the unresolved grief of a people, often linked to centuries of invasion, division, and colonisation (Park, 1999; Lee, 2002). Some scholars contest whether han is a genuinely ancient cultural concept or a modern construction projected back onto Korean history (Park, 1999), but the word's emotional weight in contemporary Korea is unambiguous. Korean cinema, literature, and music cannot be read without it.

🇩🇪 Schadenfreude (German)

"Damage-joy": the pleasure taken in another's misfortune. Schadenfreude has crossed into English so completely that it is now a routine borrowing, but it remains useful as a study case. The neuroscientist Tania Singer's lab has shown that schadenfreude has distinctive neural signatures (Singer et al., 2006). What German names with a single word, English needs the German loan to name at all — a quiet proof that lexical gaps influence what speakers can name efficiently.

🇩🇪 Gemütlichkeit (German)

A neighbour to hygge — the warmth and cosiness of a place and the people in it, often a beer-hall or a Christmas market. It is less explicitly social than hygge and more about the atmosphere a place produces.

🇷🇺 Тоска Toska (Russian)

Vladimir Nabokov's famous footnote in his commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Nabokov, 1964) is the most quoted gloss in translation studies. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska," Nabokov wrote. "At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause." Wierzbicka (2002) treats toska as a Russian cultural keyword inseparable from a broader emotional vocabulary that prizes depth over cheer.

🇪🇸 Duende (Spanish)

Federico García Lorca's 1933 essay Theory and Play of the Duende is the classical source. Duende is the dark, ecstatic spirit that possesses a great flamenco performer, bullfighter, or poet — and which distinguishes art that merely pleases from art that wounds. Lorca distinguished it from the angel (a benign muse) and the muse (an external inspiration); duende rises from inside and is associated with mortality.

4. Words for situations and relations

🪶 Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan)

Reputedly the most concise word in any language — though the claim is contested. The Yaghan (or Yámana) language of Tierra del Fuego is recorded in Thomas Bridges's dictionary (Bridges, 1933) as having a word for "a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that both desire but neither wants to be the one to start." The Yaghan community is now extremely small, and the word is sometimes treated more as a linguistic curiosity than a living term. But the documented entry is real, and the concept is unmistakable to anyone who has been the second person across the bar.

❄️ Iktsuarpok (Inuit)

The feeling of restlessness that drives you to keep going outside to check whether the person you are expecting has arrived. The word has become a favourite in the popular literature on untranslatable words, and like many Inuit terms it has been over-romanticised in the process. But the original documentation is in early ethnographies of Inuktitut-speaking communities (Schneider, 1985), and the concept maps neatly onto experiences anyone with a slow-arriving guest will recognise.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Tartle (Scots)

The hesitation you experience when you are introducing someone and realise, in the moment, that you have forgotten their name. The Scots word is documented in the Concise Scots Dictionary (1985) and survives in contemporary usage. It is the kind of word a language coins when its speakers are willing to name a small, common, slightly embarrassing micro-event that other languages just put up with.

🌍 Ubuntu (Nguni Bantu)

From the Nguni Bantu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — "a person is a person through other people". Ubuntu is a philosophical anchor across much of southern Africa and was central to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Tutu, 1999; Mbiti, 1969). It names a view of personhood as fundamentally relational: there is no isolated self to be recovered behind the social ties; the self is the ties. Several African philosophers have made the case that ubuntu represents a serious alternative to Western individualist anthropology (Ramose, 1999; Metz, 2007).

5. What this means for travellers

Words like these are useful in two practical ways.

First, they are fast keys into a culture. Asking a Finnish friend about sisu, a Brazilian about saudade, a Korean about han — these are not gimmicks. They open conversations that small-talk closes. People are generally pleased to find that a visitor has bothered to learn a piece of their inner vocabulary, and the explanation they offer is often more revealing than any guidebook section.

Second, they are noticing tools. Once you know komorebi, you start noticing leaf-filtered sun. Once you know iktsuarpok, you start noticing that you have walked to the door three times. The point is not that English speakers cannot feel these things; it is that naming a feeling makes it easier to register.

Lomas's positive cross-cultural lexicography project (2016, 2018) makes this explicit: he argues that drawing on the world's untranslatable wellbeing words is a way to enlarge any single language's emotional resolution. You do not need to switch language. You just need to admit, occasionally, that someone else's language has a word for something your own does not.

6. Are these words really untranslatable?

A serious objection runs through this entire genre, and it is worth taking head-on. As Wierzbicka and others have argued (Wierzbicka, 2014; Pinker, 2007), every word in every language can be paraphrased. The "untranslatable word" framing can shade into a soft cultural essentialism — the idea that Japanese speakers feel things English speakers cannot, or that some cultures are deeper than others.

The careful answer is the one we set up in §2. These words are not literally untranslatable; they are unlexicalised in some languages. The concept is reachable from English, but the shorthand is not. Most translation losses with these words are not losses of meaning but losses of efficiency: it takes a paragraph to do what one Portuguese word does. And efficiency matters: a word that fits in your mouth is a word you will use, share, and pass on. A paragraph is not.

The deeper point — and the one most worth taking from this article — is that languages are records of what their speakers have chosen to notice carefully enough to name. Saudade exists because Portuguese speakers, somewhere along their history, decided that a particular flavour of bittersweet missing was worth its own word. The interesting question about a foreign language is not whether it can express what your language expresses. It is what it has bothered to name that yours has not.

Further reading

Two books that go deeper into the academic terrain we touched on:

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