English words that can't be translated

On the Tomedes Translator Hub, we have previously looked at words from other languages that have no English translation — concepts like saudade, schadenfreude, and ilunga that other languages have named in a single word while English uses a phrase or goes without. The reverse is also true. There are English words that cannot be translated into many other languages with a single equivalent term.

This matters in practical translation work. When a source text contains a culturally embedded word with no direct target-language equivalent, a translator must make a choice: borrow the word, explain it, substitute a near-equivalent, or adapt the surrounding text. None of these solutions is neutral, each one changes something about the meaning or register of the original.

In this article:

1. What makes a word untranslatable?
2. 18 English words that resist direct translation
3. How translators handle untranslatable words
4. Frequently asked questions

What makes a word untranslatable?

The term "untranslatable" is actually a slight misnomer. Linguists prefer the term lexical gap, a vacuum in the vocabulary of a language where a concept exists but no single word has been coined for it. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is more precisely considered a lacuna or lexical gap. There is no one-to-one equivalence between the word in the source language and a word in the target language. A translator can, however, resort to a number of procedures to compensate for this. Wikipedia

Untranslatability is a key concept in the discussion of linguistic relativity. The idea that language structures influence (or even determine) how speakers perceive reality has been associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis since the early 20th century. EBSCO The strong form of this theory (that language determines thought) has been largely discredited by empirical research. The weaker form (that language influences habitual patterns of thinking) still holds significant support.

Two distinct types of untranslatability emerge in translation studies. Linguistic untranslatability arises from structural differences: English uses a single word where another language requires a grammatical construction. Cultural untranslatability arises when a concept is so embedded in one culture's experience that the target culture has not developed a word for it because they have not experienced the same thing.

Both types appear among the examples below.

18 English words that resist direct translation

1. Awkward

Awkward describes that peculiarly British blend of embarrassment, discomfort, and social uncertainty — the feeling that arises when someone has said something they shouldn't, when a silence stretches too long, or when a social situation has gone sideways. The closest Italian equivalent is scomodo (uncomfortable), which captures the physical dimension but misses the social and emotional register entirely. French and Spanish manage with circumlocutions (gêné, incómodo) that each capture part of the meaning. The full cocktail of shame, embarrassment, and social unease bundled into a single word seems to be distinctively English.

2. Jinx

Jinx functions as both noun and verb: it can be an object or person that brings bad luck, or it can describe the act of invoking bad luck through speech. Polish has no single equivalent, requiring a phrase meaning "something that brings bad luck." The verb form (to jinx someone, to jinx a situation) adds another layer of difficulty. The word also carries a particular register of superstitious anxiety that resists simple substitution.

3. Shallow

The figurative use of shallow (describing a person as lacking intellectual or emotional depth) presents a translation challenge in French, where peu profond (not deep) covers the literal meaning but the metaphorical punch is weakened. Italian shares the same problem. The word is distinctive because it applies the physical property of water depth directly to human character with an economy that most languages do not replicate in a single word.

4. Insight

Insight describes the capacity to gain an accurate, intuitive understanding of something complex. Spanish lacks a single equivalent, requiring translators to choose between perspicacia, percepción, penetración, or intuición — each capturing one dimension of the English word's meaning but not the synthesis of depth, accuracy, and immediacy that insight implies.

5. Nice

Nice is one of English's most semantically promiscuous words. Depending on context, tone, and emphasis, it can mean pleasant, satisfactory, kind, subtle, precise, or quietly withering (as in "that's very nice of them"). This range of meanings (from genuine warmth to deadpan understatement) makes it genuinely difficult to render in many other languages, which tend to assign more specific words to each shade of meaning.

6. Put

The verb put covers an enormous range of physical placement actions — put it down, put it in, put it on, put it away. German separates these into distinct verbs: setzen (to set), legen (to lay flat), stellen (to stand upright), hängen (to hang). German requires a speaker to specify how something is being placed; English allows that to remain unspecified. This is a clean example of linguistic untranslatability, the structural difference between the two languages creates the gap.

7. Off

The preposition off is among the most versatile in English and arguably untranslatable in its full range. French uses de as its closest equivalent, but de more accurately covers of, from, to, by, or with. The spatial, physical, temporal, and figurative uses of off (off the table, off-putting, off the record, call it off) each require different solutions in most target languages, and no single word handles all of them.

8. Bully

Portuguese has no single word for bully. The concept of systematic social torment by a person in a dominant position (rather than a single act of aggression) does not map cleanly to a Portuguese equivalent. Interestingly, the same gap does not exist for Portuguese-specific concepts: tez (the skin of the face) and the category collapses around massa (which covers pasta, pastry, dough, batter, and cake mix) illustrate how each language has its own set of lexical bundles and gaps.

9. Fortnight

Fortnight (a period of two weeks) is a useful example of intra-English untranslatability. The word is standard in British English but largely absent from American English, where it has no common single-word equivalent. Americans typically use "two weeks" or sometimes "biweekly," but the latter introduces ambiguity (it can mean twice a week or every two weeks). This illustrates that lexical gaps exist not just between languages but between varieties of the same language.

10. Serendipity

Coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, serendipity describes the occurrence of fortunate events by accident while looking for something else. It lacks a single-word equivalent in most languages. Languages handle it with phrases roughly meaning "happy accident" or "lucky coincidence," but these lose the specifically active quality of serendipity — the idea that the discovery happens in the course of a search for something else.

11. Gobbledygook

Gobbledygook refers to language that is either deliberately obscure or accidentally incomprehensible — bureaucratic jargon, technical overload, or woolly abstraction. Most languages have related concepts but express them as phrases: "administrative language" in French, bureaucratic padding in various forms. The onomatopoeic quality of the English word (it sounds like what it describes) is entirely lost in translation.

12. Flabbergasted

Flabbergasted captures extreme and dumbfounded astonishment in a single word that sounds as good as it means. Most languages handle the same state with phrases, losing the comic compactness of the original. It falls into a category of English words that linguists sometimes call expressive, words where the form reinforces the meaning in ways that survive poorly in translation.

13. Antidisestablishmentarianism

At 28 letters, this word describes opposition to the separation of the Church of England from the state — a very specific 19th-century British political position. Its untranslatability is not just lexical but historical: the concept it encodes is so tied to a particular institutional arrangement that most other languages simply have no political history in which such a word would need to exist. It is a word that could only exist in English, and then only in Victorian England.

14. Kitsch

Though borrowed from German (kitschig), the English use of kitsch has evolved into something slightly different — describing art or objects in deliberately poor taste that are nonetheless enjoyed with ironic appreciation. The German original is more straightforwardly pejorative. This evolution of borrowed words is a common phenomenon in English, which has absorbed terms from French, German, Yiddish, Arabic, Hindi, and dozens of other sources, often subtly transforming their meaning in the process.

15. Facepalm

Facepalm (covering one's face with a palm in response to embarrassment, frustration, or exasperation) began as internet slang before entering mainstream English. While the gesture itself is recognisable across cultures, the single-word label for it (particularly with its verb form ("I'm going to facepalm")) is genuinely English-specific. Most languages still require a descriptive phrase. This category of digital-native vocabulary represents a growing class of words that English coins faster than other languages can absorb them.

16. Omnishambles

Coined in the BBC political satire The Thick of It, omnishambles describes a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged through a cascade of blunders. Oxford Dictionaries selected it as Word of the Year in 2012. Its untranslatability is partly structural (it is a deliberate compound coinage) and partly cultural, as political satire vocabulary rarely translates without losing its register and edge. It is a useful example of how neologisms born in cultural satire tend to be highly resistant to direct translation.

17. Angels' share

Angels' share refers to the portion of whisky lost through evaporation while it ages in oak casks, typically around 2% per year. The term is poetic and trade-specific. Interestingly, French distillers have their own equivalent (la part des anges), which reveals the word's French origin and whisky's crossover with Cognac production. But in languages with no whisky-producing tradition, the concept requires explanation rather than translation. This is a clean example of cultural untranslatability: the word requires the cultural practice to exist before the term makes sense.

18. Xoxo

Xoxo combines the symbols for hugs (o) and kisses (x) into a single informal sign-off. The problem in translation is not that the concepts are foreign (most languages have separate words for hugs and kisses), but that no other language has compressed both into a single playful shorthand with the same social register. It is a culturally specific expression that emerged from English correspondence conventions and was amplified by digital communication.

How translators handle untranslatable words

When a source text contains a word with no target-language equivalent, professional translators use several strategies.

Borrowing — the English word is imported directly into the target text. This works when the word is already in circulation in the target culture (kitsch in French, cool globally) or when the context makes the meaning clear enough.

Circumlocution — the translator unpacks the meaning using a phrase or explanatory addition. Serendipity becomes "a happy accident" or "a fortunate discovery made while looking for something else." The meaning survives; the economy of the original word does not.

Near-equivalent substitution — a target-language word is chosen that covers most but not all of the original word's meaning. Insight becomes perspicacia in Spanish: close, but not identical.

Footnote or gloss — used in literary translation and specialist texts, where the translator preserves the source word and adds an explanation. Common for culturally specific terms like omnishambles or angels' share in contexts where the cultural reference matters.

The choice of strategy is not purely linguistic — it depends on the text type, the target audience, and what the translator judges to be most important about the original word. That judgment is one of the things that makes expert human translation irreplaceable. For figures of speech and other culturally embedded language devices, the same principles apply: the translator must first recognise the device and then decide how to handle the gap.

FAQs

Q: What does "untranslatable" really mean?
A: Strictly speaking, no word is truly untranslatable — the concept can always be expressed in another language, given enough circumlocution. What linguists call a "lexical gap" or "lexical lacuna" is more precise: the target language has no single word that captures the same concept. The meaning can be conveyed; the compactness cannot.

Q: Why does English have so many untranslatable words?
A: English is historically unusual as a borrowing language — it has absorbed vocabulary from Norman French, Latin, Old Norse, Arabic, Hindi, Yiddish, and dozens of other sources. This has given it an exceptionally large and varied vocabulary, with many near-synonyms occupying slightly different semantic territory. The result is a language with highly specific words for fine distinctions that other languages express through phrases or context.

Q: How do professional translators handle words with no equivalent?
A: The main strategies are borrowing (importing the source word), circumlocution (explaining the concept in a phrase), near-equivalent substitution, or glossing with a footnote. The choice depends on the text type and what the translator judges most important to preserve — the compactness, the register, or the precise meaning.

Q: Does the lack of a word mean a culture lacks the concept?
A: Not necessarily. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong form (that language determines thought) is not well-supported empirically. A culture without a word for serendipity can still experience and recognise fortunate accidents; they simply do not have a single label for them. What untranslatable words do reveal is what a culture has found important enough to name precisely.

Q: Does AI make untranslatable words easier to handle?
A: AI translation tools have improved dramatically in their handling of culturally embedded vocabulary. However, they tend to default to the most common near-equivalent rather than making a considered strategic choice about what to preserve and what to sacrifice. For text where the untranslatable element is central (literary translation, brand voice, cultural satire), human judgment remains essential.

English is a language that coins words quickly and borrows freely, which means new lexical gaps open all the time. If you are working on a translation project that involves culturally embedded language, idiomatic expression, or specialist vocabulary with no clear target-language equivalent, Tomedes provides professional translation services backed by human linguists with the subject-matter expertise to make those judgment calls correctly. Get in touch, support is available 24/7.