Source — Internet Archive catalog record, Rheingold, They Have a Word for It
- Title: They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases
- Author: Howard Rheingold
- Publication: J.P. Tarcher (Los Angeles), distributed by St. Martin's Press (New York) — catalog record via Internet Archive
- Date: 1988 (book); Internet Archive record accessed 2026-08-29
- URL: https://archive.org/details/theyhavewordfori00rhei
- Type: primary (library catalog metadata for the book itself) / neutral
- Accessed: 2026-08-29
Extract
- Confirms bibliographic facts: published 1988, 248 pages, ISBN 0874774640 / 9780874774641, includes a bibliography (pp. 213-219) and an index.
- Corroborated independently by this session's search (Goodreads, Amazon, Agate Magazine review) on: 1988 date, over 150 words across roughly 40 languages, arranged thematically, and — notably for the genre's genealogy — that part of the book's research was "assembled and created on early computer bulletin board services (BBS)," i.e., crowdsourced from an early online community rather than compiled solely from print dictionaries.
- This is the earliest dated English-language book-length "untranslatable words" compendium this project has identified so far, predating Jacot de Boinod's The Meaning of Tingo (2005, see
wikipedia-adam-jacot-de-boinod.md) by 17 years and the Matador Network web-listicle instance (2010, seematadornetwork-wire-2010-untranslatable-words.md) by 22 years.
Gaps
- The Internet Archive catalog record itself is bibliographic metadata, not the book's text; this project has not read the book's own framing/introduction to see how Rheingold himself justified the "untranslatable" label, nor confirmed the BBS-crowdsourcing detail against a primary source (it currently rests on secondary reviews/summaries found via search, not directly fetched and quoted this session).
- Earlier candidates (pre-1988) are unresearched — this is the earliest instance found, not established as the first.