Source — Cambridge Dictionary, Dutch–English, "gezellig"
- Title: gezellig (Dutch–English translation)
- Author: unattributed; translation credited to the PASSWORD Dutch–English Dictionary © 2014 K Dictionaries Ltd, republished via Cambridge Dictionary
- Publication: Cambridge Dictionary
- URL: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/dutch-english/gezellig
- Date: underlying translation dictionary dated 2014; Cambridge page itself undated (accessed as a live reference page)
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: tertiary/lexicographic, bilingual — a straightforward commercial bilingual dictionary, no editorial stance.
- Access method note: fetched directly (
curlwith a browser user agent, tag-stripped) and read in full.
Extract
A conventional bilingual dictionary entry — the kind of source that, by design, has to commit to ordinary one-or-two-word English equivalents rather than an essay-length gloss. Gives gezellig (adjective) as: convivial, sociable, social, companionable; and gezellig (adverb) as convivially, sociably.
This is worth recording precisely because it runs against the popular "no English word for it" framing found in the marketing/listicle sources: a real, professionally compiled bilingual dictionary offers four ordinary English adjectives without hedging, flagging none of them as inadequate. This is the same pattern this project's saudade and lagom pages have already found in professional translator practice (ordinary target-language words used case by case) — but here it comes from a dictionary's own bilingual equivalence claim, not from an observed translation choice.
Gaps
- A bilingual dictionary entry necessarily compresses; it does not explain (as Peeters 2020 and the Wiktionary usage note do) why none of "convivial," "sociable," "social," or "companionable" alone covers the word's full range — that qualification comes from other sources on file, not this one.
- Single-page entry; no etymology, no usage examples, no citations.