51 feelings English has no address for.
Placed by what they feel like rather than where they come from. North is longing and south is belonging; west is alone and east is together. Every name opens the word’s own page in the dictionary.
Climate I · 14 words
The ache
Cold light, long views, nothing in the foreground.
Climate II · 16 words
The warmth
Low sun, short distances, someone else in the room.
Climate III · 12 words
The noticing
Dappled, green, and entirely about attention.
Climate IV · 9 words
The awkward
Flat light. Nobody is having a good time.
All fifty-one, by climate
The ache14
The warmth16
The noticing12
By language
What a language keeps a word for.
The dictionary defines each of these on its own. Nothing says what they mean together — and together is where the interesting part is. German has 10 of them, and they are not scattered: almost all name a feeling about a feeling. That is a fact about German, and it needs a page of its own.
- German10Fernweh, Fremdschämen, Freudenfreude, Kummerspeck, Schadenfreude, Sehnsucht, Torschlusspanik, Verschlimmbessern, Waldeinsamkeit, Weltschmerz
- Japanese7Kintsugi, Komorebi, Mono no Aware, Natsukashii, Shinrin-yoku, Tsundoku, Yūgen
- French5Dépaysement, Flânerie, L'esprit de l'escalier, La Douleur Exquise, Retrouvailles
- Swedish4Fika, Gökotta, Lagom, Smultronställe
- Dutch4Gezellig, Niksen, Uitwaaien, Voorpret
- Spanish3Duende, Querencia, Sobremesa
- Tagalog2Gigil, Kilig
- Korean2Han, Jeong
- Greek2Meraki, Philotimo
Twelve more languages contribute one word each: Arabic, Danish, English, Finnish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Turkish, Welsh, Yaghan.
German — 10 words
A language that builds a compound noun where English writes a sentence — and keeps doing it for states nobody else bothered to name.
- Fernweh a German word for an aching longing to be far away — a homesickness for places you've never been.
- Fremdschämen Fremdschämen — properly the reflexive verb sich fremdschämen — is cringing with embarrassment on behalf…
- Freudenfreude an English coinage for the pleasure of being genuinely happy about someone else's good news, in…
- Kummerspeck the weight you put on from comfort-eating your way through emotional trouble — literally 'grief-fat'…
- Schadenfreude pleasure taken in someone else's misfortune — a completely ordinary German word that English borrowed…
- Sehnsucht a German word for an intense, bittersweet yearning for an ideal or unattainable state — a longing for…
- Torschlusspanik the panic that a window of opportunity is closing and you'll be locked out — literally, 'gate-shut…
- Verschlimmbessern to make something worse precisely by trying to fix it — a German verb that damages itself in the act of…
- Waldeinsamkeit the feeling of being alone in a forest — as a Romantic literary mood, not a plain description of a walk.
- Weltschmerz the ache of measuring the world as it is against the world as it ought to be — and finding yourself…
Disputed ground
Some of these are younger than they look.
The untranslatable-words internet recycles the same list and almost never asks where a word came from. Several of the most-shared are modern coinages wearing an old coat — and a few are not from the language they are credited to at all. Each finding below is on the word’s own page, with its sources.
Anemoia
“Ancient Greek for nostalgia for a time you never knew.”
Coined in 2012 by the writer John Koenig for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project that invents words for feelings with none. Only the roots are Greek. Sonder, from the same project and the same year, was built to sound as though it had always existed.
Source: the word’s own pageFreudenfreude
“German for joy at another’s good news.”
An anglophone invention. German already has Mitfreude, attested with usage examples back to at least 1954. The trail for the invented version runs through one psychologist’s papers and a 2022 newspaper article that gave it mass circulation.
Source: the word’s own pageShinrin-yoku
“An ancient Japanese forest tradition.”
A 1982 coinage by Tomohide Akiyama, director of Japan’s Forestry Agency — a public-health slogan, not a folk practice. The scientific research it is usually cited for began in 1990, eight years after the phrase.
Source: the word’s own pageNone of that makes the words less worth having. It makes the page worth reading, and it is the one thing on this subject nobody else is doing.