Words Other Languages Have That English Desperately Needs

English is a magpie. It has spent fifteen centuries swooping into other languages, snatching the shiniest words, and refusing to give any of them back. "Kindergarten" from German, "safari" from Swahili, "tycoon" from Japanese, "ketchup" by a winding road from a Hokkien fish-sauce word — all of them stolen fair and square and now indistinguishable from native vocabulary. And yet, for all that magpie greed, there are still glorious gaps. Concepts that other languages nailed in a single tidy word, and English can only gesture at with a sweaty paragraph.

This post is a celebration of those specific words — the ones English borrowed and the ones it really, really should. Let's get into the good stuff.

The Words English Already Caved and Stole

Some foreign words were so useful that English speakers just gave up and adopted them. Schadenfreude — German for the pleasure you feel at someone else's misfortune — is the textbook case. English has no native single word for it, so we shrugged and took the German one whole. Hygge, the Danish word for cozy, candlelit contentment, swept through English-speaking lifestyle culture around 2016 and never left. And déjà vu is so thoroughly French that most people forget it's a borrowing at all.

The word "robot" entered English in 1920 from the Czech play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek. It comes from "robota," meaning forced labor. A century later, almost no English speaker knows they're using a Slavic word for serfdom every time they talk about a vacuum cleaner.

These borrowings are exactly the kind of cross-linguistic trivia that the Etymology quiz loves to test. Half the fun of etymology is discovering that an everyday English word was wearing a foreign costume the entire time. Trace the borrowings and test yourself →

The Words English Still Hasn't Taken (But Should)

Then there are the words still sitting just out of reach, expressing feelings English speakers absolutely have but can't name efficiently.

For Specific Feelings

Portuguese gives us saudade — a deep, bittersweet longing for something or someone absent, possibly forever, possibly never even real. The Welsh have a close cousin in hiraeth, a homesickness for a home you can't return to. Both pack an emotional novel into two syllables. Meanwhile the Germans, never content with just one perfect word, also offer Fernweh — the opposite of homesickness, an ache to be somewhere else, a wanderlust so strong it hurts.

For Everyday Situations

The practical ones are even better. Georgian has shemomechama, which roughly means "I accidentally ate the whole thing" — for when the food was so good you kept going past full. Indonesian gives us jayus, a joke so unfunny, told so badly, that you can't help laughing anyway. Inuit languages have iktsuarpok, the restless feeling of going to check the door again and again because you're waiting for someone to arrive. Every one of these names a thing you've done this month.

For Beautiful Things

And then the poetic ones. Japanese is a goldmine here: komorebi is the dappled sunlight that filters through leaves, and tsundoku is the act of buying books and letting them pile up unread — a word that should have been invented in English given how guilty most readers are of it.

If these make your brain itch pleasantly, the Foreign Phrases quiz is your next stop. It tests the borrowed words and expressions floating around English that most people use without quite knowing their literal meaning. Know your bon mots? Test yourself →

Why the Gaps Exist At All

Languages develop precise words for the things their speakers do most. Cultures with long, dark winters get rich vocabulary for coziness and light. Maritime cultures get dozens of words for wind and the sea — much of which still echoes through English nautical slang. This is exactly the territory of proverbs and folk sayings, where a culture's whole worldview gets compressed into a memorable line. A proverb is basically an untranslatable word that grew up into a sentence. Decode the world's wisdom and test yourself →

It's also why every language belongs to a family with shared roots and shared blind spots. Understanding why Portuguese and Welsh both landed on a word for unreachable longing — and why English didn't — gets a lot clearer once you see how languages are related. Our Language Families quiz maps that whole sprawling family tree, from Indo-European to the isolates that have no known relatives at all. Find your linguistic roots and test yourself →

The Takeaway

No single language has all the words. That's not a bug — it's the whole point. Every untranslatable term is a little window into how another culture carved up the chaos of human experience, and every loanword English steals makes the language a bit richer and a bit weirder. So go ahead: start using komorebi next time the light hits the trees right. English took "schadenfreude" — there's no reason it can't take a few more.