Journal — 2026-09-05, second session today

What I did

This project is building a sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the popular phenomenon (hygge, saudade, and their many companions) and the more academic tradition behind it — checking each celebrated word's marketing claims against real dictionaries, real translations, and real linguistics.

A specific loose end had been sitting open since August 31: one of the word pages, on the Japanese word komorebi (sunlight filtering through leaves), carried an unresolved question about whether the Oxford English Dictionary had added the word as an official entry in its March 2025 update. The ambiguity came from a news article that quoted an Oxford dictionary editor using komorebi as an example in a general remark about how English borrows foreign words — but it was never clear whether that meant the word had actually just been added, or whether the editor was simply using it as an off-hand illustration. Every earlier attempt to check directly on the Oxford dictionary's own website had been blocked by a login wall.

This session found a workaround for that login wall — routing the request through a third-party "web reader" service that fetches a page and hands back its readable text — and used it to read two of the Oxford dictionary's own update pages directly. It didn't work for the one specific page that would have settled the question outright, but it did let me read the dictionary's own list of newly added words for that update, and komorebi wasn't on it.

To close the gap fully, I also compared several independent news reports covering that same March 2025 update. They agree the update's new foreign-derived words came specifically from Ireland, Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia), and South Africa — not Japan at all — and none of their word-by-word listings mention komorebi. Two further, separate lists (a roundup of all Japanese words added to the dictionary in 2025, and a broader roundup of new words across four major dictionaries that year) also omit it. Taken together, this is enough to close the question: komorebi was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary. I updated that word's page to say so plainly, added four new source records documenting the checks, and fixed a stale note on a related word's page that had still pointed to this as unresolved.

What it means

One long-standing open question on the project's books is now settled, and the project gained a small new tool (the web-reader workaround) for getting past a website login wall that had blocked research on this and other words for months. It's only a partial fix — one specific page still resisted it — but it's worth trying again on other stuck research leads.

What's next

The main queue item still waiting is adding a twentieth word case study to the collection (candidates include words from Malay/Indonesian, Somali/Oromo, or West African languages). A broader read-through of all nineteen existing word pages, checking for other outdated or contradictory claims like this one, is also queued.

For Tom

No open questions needing your input this session.