Untranslatable words are words that have no single-word equivalent in another language, so a translator needs a phrase or a sentence to carry the meaning across. Famous examples include Portuguese saudade, Danish hygge, Japanese komorebi and Tagalog gigil. Each one packs a whole feeling or situation into a few syllables.
Below you will find 30 of them from 24 languages, each with a plain-English meaning we checked against dictionaries and reference works. Along the way we clear up a few internet myths, including a Viking drinking story and a career diagram that never came from Japan. Explore our translation services for details.
Key Takeaways
- “Untranslatable” really means “no one-word match”: every word on this list can be explained in English, it just takes more words.
- Linguists call these holes in a vocabulary lexical gaps, and languages often fill them by borrowing the foreign word outright.
- English has already adopted several of these words, including schadenfreude, chutzpah, kilig and gigil.
- Some popular claims are myths: lagom does not come from Vikings sharing mead, and the famous ikigai diagram is not Japanese.
- Translating words like these well takes cultural knowledge, not just a dictionary.
What Are Untranslatable Words, Really?
No language has a word for everything. When one language names an idea with a single word and another does not, linguists call the hole a lexical gap. The study of untranslatability starts from that simple observation.
Here is the part that listicles usually skip: most linguists do not think any word is truly impossible to translate. The meaning can nearly always be carried over. It simply costs more words, a footnote, or a clever workaround. Explore our Latin roots behind words for details.
English can say “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees.” Japanese says komorebi and moves on.
10 Untranslatable Words for Feelings
Feelings are where vocabularies differ most. Several of these describe longing, and two of them (mudita and firgun) are the cheerful opposite of schadenfreude.
| # | Word | Language | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Saudade | Portuguese (also Galician) | A melancholic, deeply nostalgic longing for a beloved person or thing that is absent and may never return. |
| 2 | Hiraeth | Welsh | A nostalgic yearning or homesickness, traditionally for Wales itself. It is built on hir, “long.” |
| 3 | Hüzün | Turkish | A shared, inward-turning melancholy. The word comes from Arabic ḥuzn, and novelist Orhan Pamuk made it the emotional signature of Istanbul. |
| 4 | Lítost | Czech | Novelist Milan Kundera described it as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” |
| 5 | Schadenfreude | German | Pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. Literally “harm-joy,” from Schaden (harm) and Freude (joy). |
| 6 | Mudita (मुदिता) | Pali and Sanskrit | Unselfish joy in other people’s happiness and good fortune, one of the four “immeasurables” in Buddhist teaching. |
| 7 | Firgun (פירגון) | Hebrew | Genuine, generous delight in another person’s success, with no hidden motive. It entered modern Hebrew from Yiddish. |
| 8 | Kilig | Tagalog | The giddy, butterflies-in-the-stomach thrill of a romantic moment, your own or one you are watching. |
| 9 | Gigil | Tagalog | A feeling so intense, usually at something adorable, that you want to clench your hands, grit your teeth, and pinch or squeeze it. |
| 10 | Tarab (طرب) | Arabic | The heightened emotion or ecstasy that musicians and listeners share during a performance of Arab music. |
Gigil is a good example of how gaps get filled. The Oxford English Dictionary added it in March 2025, and its editors noted that English speakers simply borrow such words when they need them. Kilig made the same trip in 2016. Explore our cultural nuances in translation for details.
10 Words for Simple Pleasures and Beauty
One culture names its coffee break, another names the light under a tree.
| # | Word | Language | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Hygge | Danish (also Norwegian) | A cozy, contented mood created by comfort and good company: candles, warm drinks, nowhere to be. |
| 12 | Gezellig | Dutch | Convivial, cozy and fun all at once, describing a place, a person or an evening. It derives from gezel, “companion.” |
| 13 | Fika | Swedish | A social coffee break with something sweet, treated as a daily ritual at home and at work. The word is back slang for kaffi, a dialect word for coffee. |
| 14 | Lagom | Swedish | Just the right amount: not too much, not too little. |
| 15 | Sobremesa | Spanish | The unhurried time spent talking at the table after a meal is finished. Literally “upon the table.” |
| 16 | Tsundoku (積ん読) | Japanese | Buying books and letting them pile up unread. It began as slang in the Meiji era (1868–1912). |
| 17 | Komorebi (木漏れ日) | Japanese | Sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. The characters mean tree, leaking through, and sun. |
| 18 | Wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) | Japanese | An outlook that finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence, such as a weathered bowl or a mossy stone. |
| 19 | Flâneur | French | A person who strolls city streets with no destination, simply observing life. Poet Charles Baudelaire made the figure famous. |
| 20 | Duende | Spanish | In art, especially flamenco, a raw state of emotion and authenticity that gives the audience chills. Poet Federico García Lorca explored it in a 1933 lecture. |
Enjoying these? We have deeper dives on German words with no English translation and on Spanish words that are difficult to translate.
10 Words for Character, Connection and Fate
These words describe what people are like and how they relate to one another. Explore our cross-cultural language barriers for details.
| # | Word | Language | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | Sisu | Finnish | Stoic determination and grit in the face of extreme adversity. It is related to sisus, “interior” or “guts.” |
| 22 | Ikigai (生き甲斐) | Japanese | Whatever gives a person a sense of purpose and a reason for living, from family and friends to work and hobbies. |
| 23 | Jugaad (जुगाड़) | Hindi | A clever, unconventional fix made with whatever scarce resources are at hand; resourceful improvisation. |
| 24 | Nunchi (눈치) | Korean | The subtle skill of reading a room and sensing what others think and feel. Literally “eye-measure.” |
| 25 | Philotimo (φιλότιμο) | Greek | Literally “love of honor”: a cluster of virtues that includes doing your duty, acting with dignity and treating others generously. |
| 26 | Sprezzatura | Italian | Studied carelessness: making something difficult look effortless. Baldassare Castiglione coined it in The Book of the Courtier (1528). |
| 27 | Chutzpah | Yiddish (from Hebrew) | Audacity or brazen nerve, for good or for bad. In American English it often sounds admiring; in Hebrew it stays more critical. |
| 28 | Ubuntu | Zulu and Xhosa | Humanity toward others; the belief that a person becomes a person through other people. Often summed up as “I am because we are.” |
| 29 | Yuánfèn (缘分) | Chinese (Mandarin) | Fateful coincidence: the destined affinity that brings two people together, in romance, friendship or a chance meeting. |
| 30 | Mamihlapinatapai | Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego) | A wordless look shared by two people who both want to start something, but neither will go first. |
Which Untranslatable Word “Facts” Are Actually Myths?
Lists like this one get copied around the internet, and errors travel with them. Here are four claims worth handling with care.
- Lagom and the Vikings. The story goes that lagom is short for laget om, “around the team,” from Vikings passing a horn of mead. It is charming and false. The word is an old form of
lag
, “law,” meaning roughly “according to custom.” - The ikigai diagram. The four-circle chart (what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for) did not originate in Japan. In Japanese, ikigai can be as modest as a grandchild or a garden.
- Ilunga, “the most untranslatable word.” A London agency’s 2004 poll of 1,000 linguists crowned this Tshiluba word, said to mean a person who forgives a first offense, tolerates a second, but never a third. Language scholars questioned the claim, noting that “most untranslatable” means little unless you say into which language. We left it off our list.
- Mamihlapinatapai. It once held a Guinness listing as the “most succinct word,” but its definition varies from source to source, and a literal reading is closer to “to make each other feel awkward.” Yaghan lost its last native speaker in 2022, so treat the romantic versions as interpretation.
How Do Translators Handle Words With No English Equivalent?
Professional translators meet lexical gaps every working day, and they have a standard toolkit for them:
- Borrowing. Keep the original word, as English did with schadenfreude and chutzpah.
- Calque. Translate the parts literally, the way “harm-joy” mirrors Schadenfreude.
- Paraphrase. Explain the idea in a short phrase: “lingering at the table after dinner.”
- Compensation. When a pun or nuance is lost in one spot, add an equivalent touch elsewhere in the text.
Which tool fits depends on the reader. A novel can keep saudade in italics; a contract cannot. Explore our professional document translation for details.
Why These Words Matter for Real-World Translation
Lexical gaps are not limited to poetic words. They turn up in ordinary paperwork: a job title that exists in only one country, a kinship term that English blurs, a legal concept with no twin abroad. A word-for-word swap in those spots can change what a document says.
That is why context and cultural knowledge matter as much as vocabulary. A human translator who lives in both languages knows when to borrow a term, when to explain it, and when a translator’s note is the honest choice. If you need a document handled with that kind of care, you can see every language we work in on our language translation services page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there really words that cannot be translated?
Not in the strict sense. Most linguists agree that the meaning of almost any word can be expressed in another language. What cannot always be done is matching one word with one word. “Untranslatable” is shorthand for a word that needs a phrase, a sentence or a footnote in the target language. Poetry and puns come closest to true untranslatability, because they depend on sound and wordplay as well as meaning. Explore our Japanese translation services for details.
What is the most untranslatable word in the world?
There is no reliable answer. A widely reported 2004 poll of linguists named the Tshiluba word ilunga, and Guinness once listed Yaghan mamihlapinatapai as the “most succinct word.” Language scholars point out that the question is poorly defined, since a word that is hard to put into English may be easy to put into a neighboring language.
What is a lexical gap?
A lexical gap, sometimes called a lacuna, is a missing word: a concept one language names with a single term while another language has no single term for it. English has no one word for Swedish lagom, for example, and translators in turn rate English “serendipity” as a hard one to render. Gaps are normal in every language, and speakers often fill them by borrowing the foreign word.
Why do some languages have words that English does not?
Vocabulary grows around what a community talks about most. A culture built around a daily coffee ritual finds a word like fika handy, and one with a long tradition of emotional musical performance needs a word like tarab. English is no exception: it has borrowed thousands of words from other languages precisely because they filled a gap. Explore our expert Spanish translation for details.
What does saudade mean in English?
Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word for a deep, bittersweet longing for someone or something that is absent, often with the sense that it may never come back. English versions such as “nostalgia,” “longing” and “missing someone” each catch part of it. The feeling itself is not unique to Portuguese speakers: Welsh hiraeth and German Sehnsucht describe close cousins of the same emotion.
Need a Translation That Keeps the Meaning Intact?
Some words need more than a dictionary, and so do some documents. Our human translators know how to carry meaning, tone and cultural detail from one language to the next. Chat with us to request a quote, or call 1-800-230-7918 to tell us what you need.
