Words That Don’t Exist
Monday, May 12th, 2025George Orwell’s 1984 famously included newspeak, an effort to, among other things, make resistance unthinkable by making it unspeakable by removing words like “freedom” from the language. Lately I’ve been noticing words that don’t exist in English. They weren’t removed. As best I can tell, they never existed.
There are of course words that didn’t or don’t exist in English because the things they described didn’t or don’t exist in English: vodka, lasagna, sombrero, anime, tango, yoga. When the things came into the English speaking world, the words came with them. We didn’t need a word for vodka until it came to the US after prohibition. England seems to have had the word a century or two earlier from travelers to Eastern Europe and Russia, but it wasn’t in common use until the spirit was.
But there are also things that absolutely do exist in the United States, and the rest of the world, but which we just don’t have a word for, and can’t even describe in a pithy phrase. The classic example is schadenfreude, which is absolutely a German word, not even Anglicized, although the sentiment this expresses is absolutely a thing in the English-speaking world. Schadenfreude now shows up in a lot of English dictionaries, but there are other words that don’t.
Informaticien is my favorite example from French. It roughly translates as computer guy or computer expert, without necessarily pigeonholing someone into a particular subfield like programmer or sysadmin. I’m not sure how commonly the word is used in France, but it is a good word and I wish English had a nice word like that. I’ve even snuck it into a couple of my books over the years, but so far it hasn’t caught on.
It might not be true that Inuktitut does not have a word for snow, but it does have a lot of words for specific kinds of snow like pukak — crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. I don’t know how badly New Englanders need that word, but I have seen that kind of snow.
Japanese is a fruitful source of words we just don’t have in English. Yokozuwari is my favorite. If you’re not into anime or manga, you likely don’t know what this means, but you would immediately recognize the pose when you saw it. Words like this are quite useful when doing diffusion based image generation.
What else are we missing? What do we English speakers know, but can’t say because we just don’t have the words? Can anyone think of example from Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, or other languages?
