Word list · 22 words

Words for feelings you can't name

Some feelings are common but have no everyday English name: the perfect comeback that arrives once you have left, a word going strange after you repeat it, nostalgia for a decade before you were born. This list collects the words that name them.

They come from several places. Some are loanwords from French, German, Japanese or Portuguese, some are terms from psychology, and a few are recent English coinages that the major dictionaries have not taken up. Each entry says which kind it is, so you know whether a word has centuries behind it or a few years.

Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.

The words

L'esprit de l'escalier
L'esprit de l'escalier is the perfect retort that arrives only after you've left the room — literally, 'the wit of the staircase'.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Semantic Satiation
Semantic satiation is the temporary draining of meaning from a word when you repeat or stare at it enough times, until it becomes a bare sound or shape.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Anemoia
Anemoia is nostalgia for a time you've never known — the strange ache of missing an era you never actually lived through, glimpsed only in photographs, films, or old music.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Sonder
Sonder is the sudden realization that every passing stranger is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — full of their own ambitions, worries, and people — in which you are, at most, a…
Rare & Beautiful English
Fremdschämen
Fremdschämen — properly the reflexive verb sich fremdschämen — is cringing with embarrassment on behalf of someone else, at behaviour you find excruciating.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Voorpret
Voorpret is the enjoyment you get from looking forward to something, before the thing itself happens.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
La Douleur Exquise
In English, la douleur exquise means the ache of wanting someone unattainable.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Torschlusspanik
Torschlusspanik is the panic that a window of opportunity is closing and you'll be locked out — literally, 'gate-shut panic'.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Natsukashii
Natsukashii is the warm rush you get when something from your past turns up in front of you right now — usually exclaimed at the trigger, rather than a mood you sink into.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Mono no Aware
Mono no aware is a trained sensitivity to the emotional charge of a thing or moment, felt sharply because it will not last.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Déjà Vu
The sudden conviction that a genuinely new situation has happened before — and one leading explanation, induced in the laboratory, is a spatial layout you saw once and forgot.
Head Words
Jamais Vu
Jamais vu is the unsettling sense that something you know perfectly well — a word, a face, a room — has become strange and unfamiliar.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Presque Vu
Presque vu is the feeling of standing right at the edge of a realisation — a name, a word, an insight — that never quite arrives.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Lethologica
Lethologica is the state of not being able to summon a word you know you know — and it has almost no lexicographic standing at all.
Rare & Beautiful English
Velleity
A velleity is a wish so faint it never turns into any attempt to act on it.
Rare & Beautiful English
Kummerspeck
Kummerspeck is the weight you put on from comfort-eating your way through emotional trouble — literally 'grief-fat' — Speck here is body fat, so 'grief bacon' is a word-for-word joke, not the meaning.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Freudenfreude
Freudenfreude is an English coinage for the pleasure of being genuinely happy about someone else's good news, first traced to a 1978 paper and widely known only since 2022 — and it is not a German…
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Gigil
Gigil is the teeth-gritting, hand-clenching surge you get when something is unbearably cute — or unbearably infuriating.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Weltschmerz
Weltschmerz is the ache of measuring the world as it is against the world as it ought to be — and finding yourself inside the gap.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Ennui
A weary, listless flatness — not 'nothing to do' but 'nothing worth doing'.
Rare & Beautiful English
Saudade
Saudade is a Portuguese word for the bittersweet ache of missing someone or something absent — a longing so warm it is almost a form of love.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Hiraeth
Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a deep, grief-tinged longing for a home, a time, or Wales itself — a home that may be lost, idealised, or that never quite existed.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings

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