3 days ago
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Ever found yourself speechless in the presence of overwhelming cuteness, like your baby nephew or the cat video you saw on Instagram? There's now a word for it: gigil.
Gigil (pronounced ghee-gill) is part of a list of "untranslatable" words, or those that do not have English equivalents, that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary..
Taken from the Philippines' Tagalog language, gigil is a "feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable".
Alamak, a colloquial exclamation used to convey surprise or outrage in Singapore and Malaysia, also made the list.
"Wouldn't it be useful for English speakers to have a specific word for sunlight dappling through leaves... Or a word for the action of sitting outside enjoying a beer?" OED said in its latest update.
People who speak English alongside other languages fill lexical gaps by "borrowing the untranslatable word from another language". When they do this often enough, the borrowed word "becomes part of their vocabulary", OED said.
The majority of newly-added words from Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testament to the nations' obsessions with food.
These include kaya toast, a popular breakfast option of toasted bread slathered with a jam made from coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves; fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese and South Indian influences, where a large fish head is cooked in a tamarind-based curry; and steamboat, a dish of thinly-sliced meat and vegetables cooked in a broth kept simmering in a heated pot.
"All this talk of food might inspire one to get a takeaway, or to tapau," OED said, referring to another new word which originated from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, meaning "to package, or wrap up, food to take away".
Apart from gigil, the newly-added Philippine words include the national pastime of videoke, the local version of karaoke which includes a scoring system, and salakot, a wide-brimmed, lightweight hat often used by farmers.
Other Philippine additions include what the OED calls "idiosyncratic uses of existing English words", such as terror, sometimes used to describe a teacher who is strict, harsh, or demanding.
The OED contains more than 600,000 words, making it one of the most comprehensive dictionaries in the English-speaking world.
Its editors consider thousands of new word suggestions each year. These come from a variety of sources, including its editors' own reading, crowdsourcing appeals, and analysis of language databases.
Words and phrases from South Africa and Ireland were also part of OED's latest update.
