Which "Untranslatable" Words Are Real?

Every few months, a listicle goes viral. It has a title like 37 Words Other Languages Have That English Doesn't and it is shared, without friction, by people who feel that language is a window into the soul of a culture. They are not wrong about that last part. But the listicle, it turns out, is frequently lying to them.

Rob of RobWords decided to actually check. Over the course of a recent video, he put the internet's favourite "untranslatable" words to a two-part test: do they mean what English-language sources claim they mean, and are they genuinely resistant to single-word translation? The results sort into three rough piles — legitimate gems, well-intentioned exaggerations, and complete fabrications — and the sorting is more instructive than any listicle.

The ones that hold up

Start with hygge. The Danish word is so thoroughly embedded in English wellness culture that it has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as "a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being." That took fifteen words. Coziness comes close but, as Rob notes, Danes will tell you it doesn't quite land. Hygge survives scrutiny: real, verified, and genuinely resistant to compression.

Saudade is the same story, and then some. The Portuguese word — pronounced differently in Lisbon than in São Paulo, which is itself a small lesson about how languages live in bodies, not dictionaries — resists Google Translate's suggestion of "longing" so thoroughly that the gap almost becomes the point. The definition Rob cites comes from a 1912 text: "a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist... not an active discontent or poignant sadness, but an indolent dreaming wistfulness." A century of English-language circulation and it is still doing its own work. You cannot flatten it.

Then there is lagom, the Swedish concept of just-right-ness. Rob's Swedish tutor, Andrea, confirms it and contextualises it in a way that matters: "It's not too much and it's not too little. It's just the right amount of anything." When Rob calls this "very lagom," Andrea agrees immediately — and then adds something that reframes the whole conversation about Nordic vocabulary. "There's not this hustle mentality like always going after something new. We're just like, 'okay, this is enough.' I think this feeling of enoughness is very common."

That word — enoughness — is doing something interesting. It is an English speaker reaching for a concept that Swedish already has a container for. Which is precisely the argument for why these words matter: not because other languages are more poetic or more philosophical, but because the concepts they name reveal the priorities of the communities that coined them. Lagom is not just a word. It is evidence of a worldview.

The ones that don't

Pisang zapra, supposedly Malay for "the time needed to eat a banana," is nonsense. A Malay Mail reporter named Zuraira A.R. traced the error back to English-language books on untranslatable words that appear to have cited each other in a closed loop. The British TV show QI amplified it, later deleted the post, and apologised. The etymology seems to involve a misread combination of the Malay pisang (banana) and a Tamil word meaning "eat" — which, according to Malay Mail, can carry a somewhat vulgar meaning in that combination. Nobody in Malaysia, it seems, has ever used this as a measurement of time. A Malaysian commenter on Quora put it plainly: "We also couldn't care less how long it takes to eat a banana."

Flimpomfletteren, a Dutch word supposedly meaning "to skim stones across water," is also not real. Rob polled Dutch and Flemish speakers and got unanimous denial. It is a beautiful word that sounds exactly like what it would describe — genuinely onomatopoeic — but beauty is not the same as existence. No standard Dutch dictionary contains it.

Mabuki mabuki — cited variously as Bantu or Swahili for "to shuck off one's clothes in order to dance" — is the most troubling case. Bantu is a language family, not a language, which is a red flag before the investigation even begins. Swahili dictionaries don't contain mabuki mabuki as a phrase; one dictionary Rob checked lists mabuki as a term for a person from Madagascar. The word appears almost exclusively in the context of explaining the supposed African origin of boogie-woogie — which makes Rob suspect it may have been retrospectively constructed for exactly that purpose. The OED's verdict on boogie-woogie is precise and pointed: "An origin in an African language, as frequently proposed, is not borne out by early evidence." Rob flags this as a live question and invites correction from anyone with genuine sourced knowledge. It is the right move.

The one in the middle

Mamihlapinatapai is the internet's favourite untranslatable word. The K-pop group ILLIT named an EP after it, which is probably the clearest measure of how deep the word has penetrated global pop culture.

The definition that circulates — a look shared between two people who want the same thing but neither dares make the first move — is romantically charged and widely reproduced. The word comes from Yaghan, a language of Tierra del Fuego in the far south of Chile and Argentina, and the last fluent native speaker, Cristina Calderon, died in 2022. She was reportedly asked about mamihlapinatapai and didn't recognise it, though Rob notes, reasonably, that one speaker cannot be expected to carry an entire language's vocabulary.

The paper trail leads to a single source: a Yaghan-to-English dictionary compiled in 1956 by Reverend Thomas Bridges, a missionary who spent nearly two decades in Tierra del Fuego. The definition in his text reads: "to look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties much desire done but are unwilling to do." Note the word done — which Rob reads, perhaps correctly, as pointing more toward domestic standoffs than stolen glances. The BBC quoted linguist Yoram Meroz, who studied Yaghan and noted that Reverend Bridges "was sometimes prone to exoticizing the language and to being very verbose in his translations." Meroz suggests the word might mean something closer to simply "to make each other feel awkward." A Yaghan museum guide offers yet another reading: the moment of quiet just before a story is told.

Three interpretations. One fragile source. A dead language. Rob gives it a "maybe," which is probably the most honest verdict available.

What the fakes reveal

Here is what strikes me about the pattern of fabrications: they are not random. They tend to be charming, whimsical, or romantic. They fill gaps that English speakers seem to want filled. A word for banana-eating time. A word for stone-skimming. A word for that charged, unspoken negotiation between two people who want the same thing. These are not invented by bad actors; they emerge from a genuine hunger for proof that the world is stranger and more specific than English alone can describe.

That hunger is legitimate. The problem is that it makes people credulous, and credulity in the direction of other cultures' languages carries its own kind of condescension — a willingness to believe that of course Malay has a word for that, because Malay people must think differently, more precisely, more poetically about time. It flattens real linguistic diversity into a display cabinet of charming exotica. The actual words — the verified ones — are more interesting precisely because they are embedded in real communities, real habits of mind.

Take sextou, the Brazilian Portuguese verb meaning "it has become Friday," or more loosely, "Fridayed." The concept is simple but the word is doing something a definition alone cannot: it is collapsing a whole texture of feeling — the particular lightness of a Friday afternoon in a city where the week is genuinely over — into a single syllable of release. I have felt that shift, in a restaurant in São Paulo on a Friday at 6pm, watching the room change register as people arrived from work and greeted each other not with boa tarde but with sextou — and the word was the arrival itself, not a description of it. That is what a lived word does. A definition tells you what it means. The word, in the right mouth, at the right moment, makes you feel it.

The Dutch, meanwhile, have taaltekort: a word for something you don't have a word for. A lexical gap. The concept is so self-aware it almost folds in on itself. There was just, until now, no word for it in English — only excuses.

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By Priya Chandrasekaran