Have you ever been speechless in the presence of overwhelming kindness, like your baby nephew or the cat video you saw on Instagram? There is now a word for that: Gigil.
Gigil (pronounced Gill Ghee) is part of a list of “untranslatable” words, or those who have no English equivalents, which have been added to the English Dictionary Oxford.
Taken from the language of the Tagalog of the Philippines, Gigil is a “so intense feeling that he makes us want to be irresistible to tighten our hands closely, to hold the teeth and to pinch or tighten anyone or anything we find so adorable”.
Alamak, a familiar exclamation used to transmit surprise or indignation in Singapore and Malaysia, also made the list.
“Wouldn’t it be useful for English speakers to have a specific word for sunlight through the leaves … or a word for the action of sitting outside by enjoying a beer?” OED said in its last update.
People who speak English alongside other languages fill the lexical gaps by “borrowing the intraduisible word from another language”. When they do it quite often, the word borrowed “is part of their vocabulary,” said Oed.
The majority of the newly added words of Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testimony of the obsessions of the nations with food.
These include Kaya grilled bread, an option of popular breakfast of toast with a jam based on coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves; Fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese influences and southern India, where a large fish head is cooked in a Tamarin curry; And a steam boat, a dish of fine meat and vegetables cooked in a simmer broth in a heated saucepan.
“All this discourse on food could inspire one to get a point to take away, or to Tap,” said Oed, referring to another new word from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, which means “to pack or conclude, take away food”.
In addition to Gigil, the newly added Philippine words include the national hobby of Videoke, the local version of the karaoke which includes a rating system, and Salakot, a large and large hat often used by farmers.
Other Philippin additions include what egg calls “the idiosyncratic uses of existing English words”, like terror, sometimes used to describe a strict, hard or demanding teacher.
EOD contains more than 600,000 words, making it one of the most complete dictionaries in the English -speaking world.
Its publishers consider thousands of new words of words each year. These come from various sources, including reading its publishers, crowdsourcing calls and analysis of language databases.
The words and sentences of South Africa and Ireland were also part of the last OED update.
