Ever discovered your self speechless within the presence of overwhelming cuteness, like your child nephew or the cat video you noticed on Instagram? There’s now a phrase for it: gigil.
Gigil (pronounced ghee-gill) is a part of an inventory of “untranslatable” phrases, or people who wouldn’t 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 provides us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our palms, grit our enamel, and pinch or squeeze whomever or no matter it’s we discover so lovely”.
Alamak, a colloquial exclamation used to convey shock or outrage in Singapore and Malaysia, additionally made the listing.
“Would not it’s helpful for English audio system to have a particular phrase for daylight dappling by leaves… Or a phrase for the motion of sitting exterior having fun with a beer?” OED mentioned in its newest replace.
Individuals who converse English alongside different languages fill lexical gaps by “borrowing the untranslatable phrase from one other language”. Once they do that usually sufficient, the borrowed phrase “turns into a part of their vocabulary”, OED mentioned.
The vast majority of newly-added phrases from Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testomony to the nations’ obsessions with meals.
These embrace kaya toast, a preferred breakfast possibility of toasted bread slathered with a jam made out of coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves; fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese language and South Indian influences, the place a big fish head is cooked in a tamarind-based curry; and steamboat, a dish of thinly-sliced meat and greens cooked in a broth saved simmering in a heated pot.
“All this discuss of meals may encourage one to get a takeaway, or to tapau,” OED mentioned, referring to a different new phrase which originated from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, that means “to bundle, or wrap up, meals to remove”.
Aside from gigil, the newly-added Philippine phrases embrace the nationwide pastime of videoke, the native model of karaoke which features a scoring system, and salakot, a wide-brimmed, light-weight hat usually utilized by farmers.
Different Philippine additions embrace what the OED calls “idiosyncratic makes use of of current English phrases”, corresponding to terror, typically used to explain a instructor who’s strict, harsh, or demanding.
The OED comprises greater than 600,000 phrases, making it one of the complete dictionaries within the English-speaking world.
Its editors take into account hundreds of recent phrase solutions annually. These come from quite a lot of sources, together with its editors’ personal studying, crowdsourcing appeals, and evaluation of language databases.
Phrases and phrases from South Africa and Ireland had been additionally a part of OED’s newest replace.
