Journal — 2026-09-02 (session c)

What this project is

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the hygge/saudade-style words that get celebrated online as having no English equivalent — and eventually testing whether those claims actually hold up against real dictionaries, real usage, and how professional translators have actually handled the words in print.

Where things stood, and what this session chose to do

The last session (earlier today) added the project's seventh word, the Dutch word gezellig, and left a Dutch candidate, niksen, as a fallback for an eighth word, while also flagging that a session preferring more variety might instead look for a language the project hadn't touched yet. This session took that suggestion: all seven words so far have been Portuguese, Danish, Japanese (twice), German, Swedish, and Dutch, so this session picked a Greek word instead — meraki, the eighth word case study, and the project's first outside that existing cluster of languages.

What the session found

Meraki is the Greek word behind phrases like "she cooked with meraki" — doing something with your whole heart, soul, and personal care in it, whether that's cooking, a craft, or any other task. It's a fixture of the same online "untranslatable words" lists this project has been tracking.

The most interesting finding cuts against the word's own popular sales pitch. Meraki is usually marketed as expressing something distinctively Greek. But it turns out the word isn't even originally Greek: it was borrowed into Greek from Ottoman Turkish sometime in the last two centuries, and a standard reference dictionary (Wiktionary) shows the same borrowed word landed, with recognizably similar meanings, in at least nine other languages around the old Ottoman Empire's territory — Albanian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Georgian, a Sephardic Jewish language called Ladino, Macedonian, Serbian/Croatian, and Turkish itself. One of those relatives, in Serbian/Croatian, is even defined partly as "enjoyment of the simple things in life" — remarkably close to the very feeling Greek marketing presents as uniquely Greek. This is the clearest case this project has found yet of one of these "our culture has a special untranslatable word" claims being undercut right at the level of where the word actually came from, rather than just by a debunked origin story or a dictionary quibble.

On the research-methods side, this was also the first time this session's approach to reading a language's own official dictionary worked cleanly: instead of guessing a URL (which had failed and wasted time on two earlier words), it followed a link straight from Wiktionary to the real entry in Greece's own national reference dictionary, read it directly, and then found two other independent write-ups translating the very same entry that matched what was found — a solid three-way check that this project hasn't been able to do before.

The session also ran down, and could not confirm, a promising lead about the word's popularity in English: one write-up claimed a 2004 book of "untranslatable words" first popularized it, and that book was in fact real and covered on NPR the following year — but the actual surviving excerpts of that book and NPR segment the session could find don't happen to mention meraki by name, so that specific claim is recorded as unconfirmed rather than accepted.

As with several earlier words, no professional translator's handling of meraki in a published book was found — the session checked but came up empty, so that remains an open gap, as it does for several of the other seven words. And, in a new low point for this project's usual "did major English dictionaries pick this word up?" check: meraki has no Merriam-Webster entry, no Wikipedia article of its own (the name is claimed by an IT company and an Australian TV show instead), and — most strikingly — not even a basic English dictionary entry on Wiktionary, which for every other word so far has had at least something.

What this means

The knowledge base now covers eight words. This was a strong session both for the project's actual research question (yet another popular "untranslatable" claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and in an unusually clean way) and for its own working methods (a reliable trick for finding real foreign-language dictionaries instead of guessing at URLs).

What's next

No specific ninth word has been chosen yet. The project is also due for one of its periodic "spot-check everything already written for drift or overclaiming" passes, which the next session working on this project should either run or schedule soon.

What this needs from you

Nothing — no open question or decision is waiting on you right now.