Untranslatable words, ranked by how often they're said

Lists of "untranslatable words" are one of the internet's favourite genres, and one of its least reliable: many of the words on them are obsolete, poetic or not quite what the list says they mean, and none of them tells you whether anybody actually says the word. So this list does. Here are 23 words that English has no single word for, from the eight languages Verbavia teaches — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Esperanto and Shanghainese — ranked by how often native speakers really use them. The most common, Mandarin 加油, is number 792 in its language. Two German favourites of every list, Waldeinsamkeit and Kummerspeck, turn up 1 time each in 156 million words of German.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 7 min read

The ranking

The rank is the word's place among all the words of its language's film and television subtitles (OpenSubtitles 2018): rank 1 is the most common word in the language. For scale, the 1,000 commonest words make up about three quarters of everything said in those subtitles. Each meaning is linked to the dictionary it was checked against. The Shanghainese rank is from a different source, our own Shanghainese frequency list, because no subtitle corpus of Shanghainese exists. "Too rare to appear" means the word is missing from a subtitle corpus that, for Esperanto, is small.

The ones people really say

加油 (jiāyóu) is literally "add oil" — to refuel — and in everyday use it means "come on", "go for it", "keep going": shouted at sporting events, said to a friend before an exam. It is the commonest word here by a distance, at rank 792, inside Mandarin's everyday vocabulary. Two more Mandarin words sit high: 面子 (miànzi), "face" — your standing and dignity in other people's eyes, the thing you can give someone, save or lose — at rank 5,961, and 缘分 (yuánfèn), the luck or fate that brings two people together, at 22,515.

Saudade is the most famous entry on every list, and it earns its place on this one too: a fond memory of someone or something absent, and the ache that comes with it. It is at rank 5,195 in Brazilian Portuguese, said 5,251 times in the subtitles. Its German cousin Sehnsucht — a deep, aching longing for someone or something absent or far away — is nearly as common in its own language, at 6,879. And German's most useful untranslatable is not a feeling at all: Feierabend, at 5,862, is the end of the working day and the free time that follows it — Feierabend machen is to knock off for the day.

嗲 (tia) is Shanghainese: charming in a cute or coquettish way, and simply lovely or outstanding — Wiktionary's Shanghainese example uses it to praise a film. It is number 1,287 on the Shanghainese list. Its place in Shanghai slang is on our Shanghainese slang page.

The middle: real words, used but not daily

The French retrouvailles — the moment of meeting again after a separation, the reunion at an airport gate named as a single event — is at 14,202. Spanish has two everyday verbs English needs a phrase for: madrugar, to get up at dawn or very early (26,650), and estrenar, to use or wear something for the first time — a new coat, a new car — and also to premiere a film (28,562). French flâner, to wander about with no aim for the pleasure of looking, is at 30,610.

Further down are samideano, a fellow Esperantist, built from sama (same), ideo (idea) and -ano (member), though Esperanto's subtitle corpus is so small that it appears there only 1 time; 撒娇 (sājiāo), to act cute, coy or childish with someone who dotes on you, to win them over; Gemütlichkeit, the warm, unhurried comfort of a place or of easy company; and, from Brazil, cafuné, running your fingers through someone's hair or stroking their scalp, often to send them to sleep.

The list favourites hardly anyone says

Sobremesa — the time spent sitting at the table talking after a meal is over — is a real, current Spanish word, and lovely; it is also at rank 69,165. French dépaysement, the disorientation of being somewhere unfamiliar (pleasant or not: Larousse's own example is rechercher le dépaysement, to go looking for it), is at 103,261. Italian abbiocco, the drowsiness after a big meal, and gattara, a woman who feeds the stray cats of a neighbourhood, are both marked regional by Treccani. German Torschlusspanik, "gate-closing panic", the fear of missing out on something decisive before it is too late, is said 12 times in 156 million words.

And then the two that every list loves. Kummerspeck — literally "grief bacon", weight put on by comfort eating in hard times — is a real word that Duden marks as colloquial. Waldeinsamkeit, the solitude of the forest, is marked as poetic: a word of verse, not of conversation. Each appears 1 time in the whole German subtitle corpus. They are fine words. They are not windows into how Germans talk.

Esperanto's krokodili, "to crocodile" — to speak your own language, rather than Esperanto, among Esperantists — is too rare to appear at all, though its subtitle corpus is so small that this says little.

Why "untranslatable" is the wrong word

None of these words is untranslatable: every one is translated in the table above, in a phrase. What English lacks is a single word, which is a different and much more ordinary thing — every language lacks single words for things others have names for. What the ranking adds is the part the lists leave out. A word like 加油 is everyday vocabulary, and Feierabend and 面子 are words a learner will meet soon enough. A word like Waldeinsamkeit is a curiosity, and its fame in English is far greater than its use in German.

Te reo Māori has its own well-known set — mana, tapu, utu, whanaungatanga — and what each means, and why one English word falls short, is in Māori words with no English equivalent.

Words deliberately left out

The words English has already borrowed — Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, Zeitgeist, déjà vu — are not in the table, because English has them now. Schadenfreude, the most famous untranslatable of all, is at rank 35,856 in German, rarer than Sehnsucht or Feierabend. These words have posts of their own, each with how often native speakers actually use them: German words used in English, French words used in English and Spanish words used in English.

If you are learning one of these languages, the useful words are the high-ranked ones, and they are the ones each course teaches first. The full lists, in the order people use them, are free: Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Spanish and the rest. The German vocabulary test estimates in two minutes how many of them you already know, and the German course starts from the commonest.

Sources

• Every meaning is linked in the table above to the dictionary it was checked against: the Diccionario de la lengua española (RAE), Larousse, the Vocabolario Treccani, the Dicionário Priberam, Duden and Wiktionary.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
• Verbavia, Shanghainese Word Frequency v1 (2026), CC0. doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34001649
• The words, meanings and sources are written by hand in scripts/frequency_extras.py; the ranks are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py.