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Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, spends all day reading citations and trying to define words like “Monophysite" and “bodice ripper." She has been doing this sort of thing since[…]
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The Oxford Dictionary estimates that there may be, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words—not counting technical and scientific vocabulary, regional slang, or inflections—and yet, at times, there still don’t seem to be enough to express exactly how we feel. It’s times like these that even lexicographers like Kory Stamper, who know words inside out, end up borrowing terms from non-English languages. Words like ‘kummerspeck’ in German and ‘sisu’ in Finnish can capture entire worlds in just a single word. Stamper runs us through four foreign-language words that have no English equivalent, but will probably leave you with an epiphany of: “Oh yeah! That’s what I was feeling!” Kory Stamper is the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.


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