Word list · 16 words
Words for slowing down
Many languages have a word for a kind of slowness that English has to describe at length: staying at the table to talk after a meal, a coffee break that is a social ritual, doing nothing on purpose, a walk in the wind to clear your head. This list gathers them, with a few English words for the same impulse.
Some of these words have travelled into English as lifestyle trends and lost detail on the way. Each entry gives the meaning the word has in its own language, not only the export version.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Sobremesa
Sobremesa is the stretch of talk that keeps everyone at the table after the food is gone.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Fika
Fika is a coffee-and-cake break taken as a deliberate social pause — and, as a verb, the act of taking one.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Hygge
Hygge is a Danish and Norwegian word for a mood of cosy, contented togetherness — the everyday warmth, comfort and easy conviviality of feeling safe, unhurried and at home with the people you're with.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Gezellig
Gezellig is the warm, easy pleasantness of good company — used of a room, an evening, or a person.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Lagom
Lagom is the right amount — enough and no more — used of quantity, temperature, effort or behaviour, and it can be an insult.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Niksen
Niksen is an informal Dutch verb meaning to do nothing or laze about — closer to 'loafing' than to any mindfulness practice.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Uitwaaien
Uitwaaien is an everyday Dutch verb for wind blowing something out or about — including going out into a strong wind to refresh yourself.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Friluftsliv
Friluftsliv is Norwegian and Swedish for outdoor life in your free time, especially in forest and open country.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Shinrin-yoku
Shinrin-yoku is unhurried, sensory time spent among trees, promoted in Japan as preventive health — and it's a 1982 government coinage, not an ancient tradition.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Gökotta
Gökotta is an early-morning spring outing, traditionally on Ascension Day, to be outdoors when the cuckoo first calls.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Flânerie
Flânerie is unhurried strolling with no destination — classically through a city, treating the street as something to be read.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Smultronställe
A smultronställe is a personal, cherished spot you found for yourself and mostly keep to yourself — literally, a wild-strawberry place.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Querencia
Querencia is the patch of ground an animal — or a person — instinctively returns to and fights hardest from.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Komorebi
Komorebi is the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees — the dappled, shifting play of light and shadow that falls beneath a canopy.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Wabi-Sabi
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence and simplicity — in the asymmetry of a handmade bowl, the patina of age, the quiet grace of things…
Aesthetics & Cultural Movements
JOMO
The active pleasure of deliberately not attending, not following and not keeping up.
Internet & Digital Culture