A Word for That

There is a Japanese word for the light that falls through leaves.

A Finnish word for the courage that shows up after your courage has run out. A Welsh word for missing a home you may never have had. A Danish word you say out loud, once, to put down something small and annoying.

You have felt every one of them. You simply never had a handle to pick them up by.

A Word for That gathers one hundred of the world's most quietly astonishing words, each with the story behind it: where it came from, what its speakers actually mean by it, and how it came to mean that. Plus fifty more in brief - a hundred and fifty words in all, from fifty languages.

Inside you will find

• The Norwegian word that turned a national lockdown into an invitation
• Why nostalgia was once a fatal disease, and why Swiss soldiers were forbidden to sing
• The Icelandic word for weather that is magnificent from indoors and appalling outside
• What ikigai actually means to Japanese people, as opposed to what the famous diagram says
• A word from a language whose last native speaker died in 2022
• Which beloved "untranslatable" words turn out not to exist at all

Most books in this genre repeat each other. This one checks. Where a word's popular story could not be verified, it says so - and the true version is almost always better than the myth.

Warm, curious and carefully sourced, this is a book about the small things people decided were worth naming, and how much larger the world gets once you know their names.

Open it anywhere.