2. The genre and where it came from

The project’s first surprise was that the genre is older than its most famous moment. Ask an English reader when the untranslatable-words craze began and the likely answer is 2016, the year of hygge. That year the Danish word for cozy conviviality was shortlisted as a word of the year by both Oxford Dictionaries and Collins, and at least ten English-language books built around it appeared, followed, by most accounts, by candles, slippers, and sweaters marketed under the word, and then by the hunt for “the next hygge” (the popular phenomenon). The next hygge was duly found. Swedish lagom, “just the right amount,” was pitched in 2017 as its successor; a British journalist living in Sweden wrote at the time that “Vogue started it, touting Swedish lagom as the successor to hygge,” and all three quotations that the crowd-written dictionary Wiktionary uses to attest the English noun lagom come from three different English books titled some variation of “Lagom,” all published that year (lagom). A year later, the publisher’s copy for a book on Finnish sisu asked, in so many words, “After you’ve cultivated the coziness of the Danes (hygge) and achieved the Swedish way of moderation (lagom), then what’s next?” (sisu). The genre, by 2018, was citing its own back catalogue.

But 2016 was a peak, not an origin. Working backwards, the project assembled a chain of English-language instances, each fetched and read directly rather than taken from a search engine’s summary:

• 2014. Ella Frances Sanders’s illustrated Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (Ten Speed Press), a bestselling gift book that arguably rehearsed, two years early, the format the hygge books would repeat.
• 2010. The Matador Network article quoted in section 1, “20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World” — an early instance of the genre in pure web-listicle form, popular enough to spawn a same-outlet sequel. Three weeks later the linguist Geoffrey Pullum wrote on Language Log that the list’s central untranslatability claim was “self-evidently untrue,” while conceding that the list was “reasonably well-curated” (source record). Nine of the project’s twenty-five words — toska, mamihlapinatapai, iktsuarpok, litost, wabi-sabi, Schadenfreude, hygge (as hyggelig), ya’aburnee, and saudade — turn out to be on that one 2010 list, a count the project’s own record had put at five until a re-check at close-out (source record).
• 2005. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book The Meaning of Tingo, which by its own account drew on “280 dictionaries and 140 websites.” A comment on Pullum’s post, attributed to the lexicographer Ben Zimmer, claims the book recycled its examples from earlier compendia; the project could not find the earlier post the comment refers to and files the claim as unconfirmed.
• 1988. Howard Rheingold’s They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases (J. P. Tarcher), over 150 words from some forty languages — the earliest dated English-language instance the project found, though not established as the first. Part of it was reportedly assembled through early computer bulletin boards, a detail the project did not confirm.

A dedicated search for something earlier than 1988 found nothing that clearly belongs to the genre. What did turn up was that the discourse is older than the genre: a direct query of the Google Books Ngram corpus shows the exact phrase “untranslatable words” circulating in English print continuously since at least 1940, flat and noisy for decades, then rising unambiguously from about 2017: independent corroboration that the hygge year marked the genre’s peak, with print catching up over the next two or three years (source record).

Individual words, meanwhile, have their own genealogies, and several run earlier than the genre’s web-listicle and gift-book era. Yaghan mamihlapinatapai was listed in the Guinness Book of Records for 1994 as “the most succinct word,” and it has been repeated ever since; in 2026 a South Korean pop group released an EP under the name (mamihlapinatapai). Dutch gezellig was reportedly being explained to English readers in a comedic expat guidebook first published in 1989, The UnDutchables (known to the project only through Wikipedia’s citation of it), and certainly in a Slate travel diary in 2005; by 2014 the word’s framing had reached the highest level of Anglophone public life, when Barack Obama told a press conference in The Hague that he was told there was “a Dutch word that captures this spirit, which doesn’t translate exactly into English” and that his visit had been “truly gezellig” — a remark the project verified against the White House transcript (gezellig). And the newest channels are as varied as the old ones: a 2021 Halsey album closes with a track titled “Ya’aburnee”; Maria Popova’s The Marginalian published a ten-word list drawing on Tiffany Watt Smith’s The Book of Human Emotions two weeks before the project found it.

Three features of the genre emerged from reading its instances side by side. First, it favors feelings. Chi Luu, in a skeptical 2016 essay, observed that the words selected are predominantly affective and social — moods, manners, longings — and rarely concrete nouns, a pattern that itself demands explanation. The project’s own words bear this out (section 3.5). Second, the genre is self-referential: a 2023 post introducing Amharic tizita explains it as “perhaps similar to the Portuguese ‘saudade,’” and compares a second Amharic word to Schadenfreude (tizita); new entries are introduced by reference to old ones, and the old ones are rarely re-examined. Third, the genre almost never cites its sources. The 2010 listicle names no dictionary, informant, or prior book for any of its twenty words. When the project went looking for the primary evidence behind the most famous entries, it sometimes found a chain of retellings with nothing at the bottom.

Why does the genre exist? The reference literature the project began from reports, citing the translation scholar Brian James Baer, that untranslatability claims function as proof of national distinctiveness, and quotes the linguist Alexandra Jaffe’s summary of the folk premise underneath: that “each language has its own ‘genius,’ an ‘essence’ that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the ‘soul’ of its culture or people.” Section 6 takes up who benefits from making the claim.