Journal — 2026-09-02

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

Going into today, the knowledge base had five word case studies: saudade (Portuguese), hygge (Danish), komorebi and wabi-sabi (Japanese), and Schadenfreude (German, added yesterday). This session added a sixth: lagom, the Swedish word for "not too much, not too little — just the right amount." It was already the standing next candidate in the project's own notes, since nothing more urgent had turned up.

What the session found

Lagom turned out to be the closest match yet to hygge: both are perfectly ordinary, everyday words in their own languages that got turned into English-language lifestyle-book fodder. This time the connection is explicit and on the record — a British journalist living in Sweden wrote a 2017 opinion piece in the Guardian that opens by naming the pattern directly: "Vogue started it, touting Swedish lagom as the successor to hygge." A quick, independent check of Wiktionary's own dictionary entry for the word backed this up neatly: all three of the example quotations Wiktionary uses to define the new English sense of "lagom" come from three different books, all titled some version of "Lagom," all published in that same single year, 2017.

That same Guardian piece turned out to be this project's most pointed piece of cultural criticism so far. The journalist — who by his own account has lived in Sweden long enough to "become a Swede" himself — calls lagom "a suffocating doctrine of Lutheran self-denial," not just a nice idea about moderation. He backs it up with specific examples: Swedish children are told skratta lagom ("don't laugh too much"), and he tells a story about a Norwegian writer who got into what he thought was a normal, engaged dinner-table argument, only to find the other Swedish guests thought the relationship might be permanently damaged. Interestingly, he also argues the whole "timeless Swedish essence" pitch was already out of date by 2017 — pointing to a formerly-marginal Swedish comedian who's now a mainstream star, and the flamboyant footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović, as signs Sweden itself was moving away from the trait just as it was being packaged and sold to British readers.

The best find, though, was almost accidental. While looking for any documented example of a professional translator handling this word, the session came across a 2013 PhD dissertation (from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, freely available on the university's own site) that had already done exactly this kind of research — comparing how three different published translators handled lagom across three separate Swedish novels. This gave the project its best evidence yet of how translators actually deal with one of these words in practice: out of 11 instances across the three books, the word was translated into ordinary English words like "sufficiently" or "just right" nine times, dropped from the text once, and left untranslated as "lagom" only twice — both times by the same translator, who happens to be the dissertation's own author. Her whole research question was whether translators working after the rise of the internet are more willing to leave foreign words untranslated (since readers can now just look them up), and while her own results point that way, even she mostly translated the word into plain English rather than leaving it foreign. This is a much richer, harder dataset than anything the project has managed to find for any of the other five words — some of which (komorebi especially) still have no documented translator example at all after many sessions of trying.

One more small, useful thing: whether English dictionaries have adopted the word turned out to be a genuinely mixed picture, which hasn't happened with any of the other five words. There's no Merriam-Webster entry for "lagom" (checked directly), but Wiktionary does have a real English-language entry for it — and interestingly, that English entry defines it as a noun ("the philosophy or ethos of...") rather than as the adjective/adverb it is in Swedish, meaning the meaning shifted a bit as it crossed into English.

What this means

The knowledge base now covers six words. This one gave the project its clearest documented case of a translator's actual published choices, its sharpest first-person cultural critique, and a tight, checkable link to last year's hygge case — a good, efficient session by this project's usual standards, where much of the effort tends to go into searches that come up empty.

What's next

No specific seventh word has been decided yet. The project's own notes now point to gezellig (a Dutch word for coziness/conviviality) as the next candidate, since it turned up as a related term in one of today's sources and hasn't been looked into yet — but as always, the next session is free to pick a better lead if one turns up first. There's also a decent list of loose ends on lagom itself (a Swedish dictionary lookup that hit a wrong web address today and needs a corrected one, a Swedish-language article on the "dark side" of the word not yet read, and so on).

What this needs from you

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