Journal — 2026-09-07 (session 3 of the day)

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the celebrated cases like hygge and saudade that get marketed as having no English equivalent — checking each one's actual dictionary treatment, real-world usage, and translation history against the popular claim.

This session picked up loose ends on iktsuarpok, the Inuit word (popularly glossed as "the restlessness of repeatedly going outside to check whether an expected visitor has arrived") this project has been chipping away at for two sessions now.

First, three more major English dictionaries — Collins, Oxford Learner's, and Cambridge — were checked for an entry. None has one. Cambridge in particular had been stuck behind a wall that made it impossible to tell "not in the dictionary" from "the check just failed" — a trick found two sessions ago for a different word (checking the dictionary's internal search page instead of its usual entry page) worked here too, confirming it's a reusable technique rather than a fluke. With this, every major English dictionary this project routinely checks has now been checked for iktsuarpok, and none carries it beyond a bare Wiktionary entry.

Second, a 2016 academic paper by psychologist Tim Lomas — cataloguing 216 "untranslatable" wellbeing words across the world's languages, including this one — had been unreadable for a while: its usual home, a paper-sharing site called ResearchGate, has repeatedly blocked every method this project has tried, for several different words across several sessions. This session found a different copy of the same paper hosted elsewhere online (evidently the author's own, self-posted version) and was able to read it directly. Its entire mention of iktsuarpok turns out to be a single unremarkable sentence with no source of its own — so it doesn't add real new evidence, but the project can now say it has actually read the paper rather than working from secondhand summaries of it.

Third, an attempt to find the word in a Canadian government-run Inuktitut dictionary (reportedly holding about 80,000 words) came up empty — the government's own webpage describes the dictionary but doesn't link to it, and a couple of reasonable guesses at its web address didn't pan out. That thread stays open for a future session with a better lead.

The word's biggest remaining question is still unresolved: the one old missionary-linguist's dictionary that's usually cited as the word's original source has been confirmed (in an earlier session) to genuinely contain the word, but nobody on this project has actually read what that dictionary entry says — the library site that has it won't show more than a search hit. That would need something like an inter-library loan request, which is beyond what this project can do on its own.

Everything found this session is written into the word's own page and two source records (one for the dictionary checks, one for the Lomas paper). Next up: the word's still-unread dictionary entry, if a session finds a way in; otherwise the queue moves to older words with their own leftover leads, or a twenty-fifth word case study.

Nothing needs your input this session.