NBC News — "Overcome when struck by cuteness? There's a word for that feeling"
- Author: byline not surfaced by this project's fetch (NBC News / world desk)
- Publication: NBC News
- Date: 2025 (March 2025 OED-update news cycle; exact day not captured)
- URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gigil-overcome-cuteness-oxford-english-dictionary-new-words-rcna198316
- Type: secondary (mainstream news reporting on a dictionary-publisher announcement); neutral/credulous stance — reports the OED's own framing without independent skepticism
- Accessed: 2026-09-04
Extract
- Quotes the OED definition directly: gigil produces "the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable."
- States gigil was among 42 words added to the OED in March 2025 that are "untranslatable or have no direct English equivalents."
- Notes the phenomenon is "also referred to as 'cuteness aggression.'"
- States gigil can function as both noun (the feeling itself) and adjective ("I'm so gigil").
- Lists other words from the same OED update reported in this article: komorebi (Japanese, "sunlight filtering through leaves"), utepils (Norwegian, "sitting outdoors enjoying a beer"), videoke (Filipino), terror (Filipino, "a strict, demanding teacher"), otak-otak and ketupat (Malaysian/Singaporean dishes), alamak (Malaysian/Singaporean exclamation), gatvol (South African, "extremely annoyed"), debs (Irish, "formal student social event").
Gaps
- No OED editor or linguist is quoted directly by name in the passage about gigil itself, though OED executive editor Danica Salazar is quoted (paraphrased) elsewhere in the piece on the general "lexical gap... filled by... borrowing" phenomenon, illustrated with komorebi and Norwegian utepils as examples — this project's direct re-fetch of the raw article HTML (2026-09-04) confirms the exact sentence: "For example, komorebi is a Japanese word to describe sunlight dappling through leaves, while the Norwegian term utepils means sitting outside enjoying a beer, both of which have no English equivalents but are gaining popularity." This sentence is ambiguous as to whether komorebi was itself a new OED headword in the March 2025 batch, or merely Salazar's illustrative example of the general phenomenon — the article does not place komorebi in a list of newly added words the way it does for gigil, and this project's separate search this session surfaced a live Collins Dictionary "New Word Proposal" (i.e., an unapproved pending submission, not an adopted entry) for komorebi, which weighs against it already being a settled dictionary headword. Not treated as confirming OED adoption for komorebi — flagged instead as an open, unresolved lead on that word's own page (see
wiki/words/komorebi.mdGaps). - This project's own direct fetch of
oed.comdictionary-entry and/discover/pages redirects to an OAuth login wall (standing fence — seewiki/conventions.md/NEXT.md), so the OED's own wording is known only via this and other secondary reporting, not read first-hand.