If you have ever experienced the indescribable sensation of being so overwhelmed by tenderness that almost seems unbearable, there is now a word for that.
Gigil, pronounced “Ghee-Gill”, is one of the 42 words added to Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in March that are not traditional or do not have direct equivalents in English.
Originally from Tagalog and also used in Filipino English, “Gigil” refers to “a feeling we have when we see someone or something nice,” according to the OED.
It is “such an intense sensation that gives us the irresistible impulse to tighten our hands, tighten our teeth and pinch or squeeze whoever or whatever we find so adorable, whether it is a boiled baby or a small spongy kitten.”
The word, which dates back to 1990, according to Oxford, can be used as a noun to identify “strange and paradoxical emotion” or as an adjective for the person who experiences feeling.
For example, to say that you are “so gigil” would mean that you are dealing with the overwhelming feelings “generally positive.”
The Oed executive editor, Danica Salazar, explained in the update that when people speak of “non -translatable words”, what they mean are words that have been lexicalized in a language but not in others, since no word is really completely unknown.
For those who speak several languages together with English, they can easily fill that lexical vacuum taking the word of a different language.
“Sometimes, they do this frequently so that the word borrows finally becomes part of the vocabulary of its English variety,” Salazar wrote.
