Sometimes, you just can't find the right words...

Even though English is the 3rd most commonly spoken langauge in the world (after Mandarin and Spanish), sometimes I flounder to express myself and just end up drooling words all over myself.

Here's a cool list of some words that simply don’t exist in the English langauge (and yet after reading this list, you’ll wish they did!):

1. Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut
2. Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

3. Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need of a fist

4. Bakku-shan (Japanese): A beautiful girl… as long as she’s being viewed from behind

5. Duende (Spanish): a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.

6. Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love

7. Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute

8. L’esprit de l’escalier (French): usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

9. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire

10. Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. It’s when you put something of yourself into what you’re doing

11. Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation

12. Schadenfreude (German): the pleasure derived from someone else’s pain

13. Sgriob (Gaelic): The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky

14. Taarradhin (Arabic): implies a happy solution for everyone, or “I win. You win.” It’s a way of reconciling without anyone losing face. Arabic has no word for “compromise,” in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement

15. Tatemae and Honne (Japanese): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively

16. Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbor’s house until there is nothing left

17. Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods

18. Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language