Efficiently Expressive Words That Don’t Exist in English

PBS series Otherwords host Dr. Erica Brozovsky, PhD of the University of Texas at Austin looks at different languages that use single, efficient words to express certain feelings and experiences. Not only do these words not exist in the English language, many times these feelings require a sentence or two to describe.

One such popular word that follows this example is “schadenfreude”, a German word that expresses the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Brozovky names others that are just expressive.

English has more words than most other languages, but there are still so many familiar things and experiences that we don’t have a word for… but other languages do!