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If you’ve ever experienced the indescribable feeling of being so overwhelmed by cuteness that it almost seems unbearable, there’s now a word for that.
Gigil — pronounced “ghee-gill” — is one of the 42 words added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in March that are either untranslatable or have no direct English equivalents.
Originally from Tagalog and also used in Philippine English, “gigil” refers to “a feeling we get when we see someone or something cute,” according to the OED.
It’s “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, whether it be a chubby-cheeked baby or a fluffy little kitten.”
The word — which dates back to 1990, according to Oxford — can be used either as a noun to identify the “strange, paradoxical emotion” itself or as an adjective for the person experiencing the feeling.
For example, to say you are “so gigil” would mean that you are dealing with the “usually positive” overwhelming feelings.
OED Executive Editor Danica Salazar explained in the update that when people talk about “untranslatable words,” what they mean is words that have been lexicalized in one language but not in others — since no word is truly entirely untranslatable.
For those who speak multiple languages alongside English, they can easily fill that lexical gap by borrowing the word from a different language.
“Sometimes, they do this with enough frequency that the borrowed word eventually becomes part of the vocabulary of their variety of English,” Salazar wrote.
