There is a bench outside my building in Bangkok, under a tree I could not identify if you paid me. Late afternoon, the sun comes through the leaves in moving patches, and for ten minutes the pavement looks like something worth badly photographing on a phone.

I sat on that bench for two years before I learned there was a word for it. Japanese has 木漏れ日, komorebi: sunlight leaking through the gaps between leaves and branches. English needs a full sentence and a run-up.

Here is the part that stuck with me. I started noticing the light more often once I had the word for it.

A dictionary noticed the same thing

I am not the first to get stuck on this. In its March 2025 update, the Oxford English Dictionary added a batch of borrowed words and used komorebi as its example of the gap it wanted to fill. Wouldn’t it be handy, they asked, to have one word for dappled light through leaves? Or one for sitting outside enjoying a beer, which Norwegian manages in seven letters: utepils.

They also made a point that gets lost in the listicles about beautiful untranslatable words. Nothing is truly impossible to translate. A decent translator can render komorebi in English all day. What makes these words interesting is that one language has bothered to compress the idea into a single unit and another has not.

That is a smaller claim than the mystical version. It is also more useful, because compression is something you can copy.

Gigil got in before I did

In that same update, the OED added eleven words from the Philippines. One of them was gigil.

I grew up with gigil in Manila. It is what you feel looking at something unbearably cute, a fat-cheeked baby or a small aggressive kitten, and it arrives as a physical urge: clenched hands, gritted teeth, the need to squeeze the thing. The OED dates its use in Philippine English to at least 1990.

What I remember is boarding school in Australia, aged thirteen, trying to explain gigil to a room of teenagers who had never needed the concept. I ended up miming it. They thought I was describing a cramp.

The feeling was identical in both countries. Only one of us could say it in two syllables.

Does having the word change what you see?

This is where I have to be careful, because the popular version of this idea is oversold.

The tidiest evidence comes from blue. Russian has no single umbrella word for it. Lighter blues are goluboy, darker blues are siniy, and Russian speakers cannot dodge the distinction the way English speakers can.

A 2007 study in PNAS asked both groups to pick which of two blue squares matched a third. Russian speakers were quicker when the squares fell either side of their language’s boundary. English speakers, given identical squares, got no such boost.

Best of all, the advantage vanished when participants had to silently rehearse an eight-digit number while they worked. Tie up the words and the effect goes with them, which suggests the language was doing live work rather than having rewired anyone’s eyes.

Then a 2020 re-run in Cognition repeated the tasks and found the effect had real limits. So the question is still live: language nudges attention, but it does not install new hardware.

A nudge is still worth having.

Naming a feeling takes the edge off it

There is a second strand of research here, and this one I use.

A UCLA team ran an fMRI study, published in 2007, where people looked at angry and frightened faces. When they simply looked, the amygdala lit up. The amygdala is the bit of the brain that handles threat, the smoke alarm. When they picked a word for the emotion instead, the alarm quieted down and a region behind the forehead associated with deliberate thinking became more active.

Researchers call this affect labelling. In plain terms, putting a feeling into words seems to turn the volume down on it.

One imaging study is one imaging study, and small fMRI samples deserve caution. But it matches something I have found reliable. “I feel awful” sits in your chest all day. “I am embarrassed about how I handled that phone call” is smaller, more specific, and has an obvious next move. Precision shrinks things.

How to borrow well

The psychologist Tim Lomas has spent years collecting words like this. His 2016 paper catalogued 216 untranslatable terms relating to wellbeing, sorted into feelings, relationships and character, and the list has since grown past 600. It is a good place to raid.

My rule for keeping one is simple: it has to name a feeling I already have and struggle to describe well. Thai has sabsung, the lift you get from something that revives you. I use that one, because I needed it. I have quietly dropped a dozen prettier words that I was collecting rather than using, which is a hobby, not a practice.

Two things make it stick. Say it out loud to someone, which forces you to define it and doubles as decent conversation. And when no borrowed word fits, invent one. Households do this constantly. Every family I have known has a private term for some specific domestic irritation, and those work as well as the ones in Oxford.

Back to the bench. The tree is still unidentified and the light still arrives around half four. The difference is that I look up now.