Filipinos call it gigil: the urge to clench your hands or squeeze something because it is almost unbearably cute — Yale psychologists only began experimentally studying the same strange response in 2012, eventually describing it as “cute aggression"

Somebody holds up a baby with cheeks like bread rolls, and something odd happens to your hands. They clench. Your jaw tightens. There is a brief flicker of an urge to squeeze. It is alarming for about half a second. Then it passes, and the conversation carries on about the baby’s hat.

English has never had a word for that. Tagalog has had one for generations.

It is gigil, pronounced roughly ghee-gill, and as of March 2025 it is officially English as well.

The word got there first

The Oxford English Dictionary added gigil in its March 2025 update, alongside ten other Filipino words including videoke, kababayan and CR, the gloriously practical local term for a toilet. The definition is unusually physical for a dictionary entry. An intense feeling, it says, typically showing up as tightly clenched hands, gritted teeth, a trembling body, or the pinching of whatever caused the trouble. The OED called it a pithy name for “such a strange, paradoxical emotion”.

Two things about that entry are worth slowing down for.

The first is the date. The OED traces written use in Philippine English back to 1990. In Tagalog the word had been doing its job long before anyone bothered writing it down for an English audience.

The second is that cuteness is only part of the job. The official definition also covers anger and eagerness. Someone stuck in traffic can be gigil. So can someone waiting for a delayed announcement, or watching a football match go badly. So adorableness is one trigger among several. What the word actually names is a feeling that has outgrown the space available for it, and a body that has started doing something about the overflow.

The lab arrived in 2013

Formal research is a great deal younger than the vocabulary.

A Yale team presented a poster at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in January 2013 under the title “It’s So Cute I Want To Squish It!” Rebecca Dyer, Oriana Aragón and their colleagues had shown volunteers three sets of pictures: cute animals, funny ones, neutral ones. Then they recorded what came out of their mouths. Only the cute set produced expressions of aggression, and it tracked a reported sense of losing control. Participants who had just looked at cute images were also more likely to pick aggressive endings for ambiguous stories.

The full work landed in Psychological Science in 2015, where the team named the effect cute aggression. In one study, photographs of babies were digitally edited to push the cuteness dial both ways. One set got bigger eyes and rounder cheeks. The other got smaller eyes and larger noses. The enhanced babies produced more of the clenching, growling, squeeze-it response. Aragón has estimated that somewhere between half and sixty per cent of people feel it.

Why a brain would bother

The Yale group’s explanation puts cute aggression in a wider family they call dimorphous expressions. Dense phrase, familiar thing: crying at happy news, laughing when nervous, saying something rude to a friend who has just done something lovely.

The theory is that when one emotional channel gets overloaded, a second and opposite one opens to take the pressure off. Someone flooded into uselessness by how adorable an infant is makes a poor carer for the next few minutes. A small burst of mock aggression appears to bring the system back down to operating temperature. The group also found these responses cluster together, so whoever is pinching cheeks at a christening is likely the one weeping through the speeches later.

Three years later, someone put electrodes on it. At UC Riverside, Katherine Stavropoulos and Laura Alba ran an EEG study published in 2018. Fifty-four adults aged 18 to 40 had their brain activity recorded while looking at babies and animals, cute and less so. Both the reward system and the circuitry handling emotional intensity showed up, and the strongest relationship was between reported cute aggression toward baby animals and the reward response. Curiously, the baby photographs did not produce the same clean pattern the animals did.

That is one study with 54 people, leaning partly on what participants said about themselves, so treat it as a promising first look rather than a settled account of the mechanism.

Nobody is going to bite the baby

The operational definition used across this research is careful to include the phrase “without desire to cause harm”, and that qualifier does most of the work here. The urge arrives, gets expressed as a noise or a clench or a sentence about eating somebody’s toes, and evaporates. It does not build toward anything. Treating it as a warning sign gets the physiology backwards, since the response appears to be part of the caregiving machinery rather than a glitch in it.

Filipino speakers have been comfortable with this for a very long time, which is probably the most useful thing in the whole story. Having a word for a strange internal event makes it ordinary. Nobody panics about an emotion that already has a name and a pronunciation. Saying “gigil” out loud in a room full of people who know what it means turns a slightly unsettling impulse into a shared joke about a fat-cheeked baby.

Which is a decent argument for borrowing words more often. Half the trouble with an odd feeling is the suspicion that nobody else is having it. A dictionary entry is a cheap fix for that.

English took until 2025 to borrow it. Late, but it got there.