WorldFeels

A real case · you decide

Mira finds the word

Mira — seventeen, back home after a year abroad, missing a place and a feeling she has no English word for

The idea in play: the affect map is universal, but the WORDS a language gives a feeling are not — some feelings have one precise word in one tongue and only a whole phrase in another.

Mira keeps saying "I miss it, but not exactly — it is more like… missing AND being glad I had it, at the same time." English keeps handing her half the feeling: "nostalgia" is only the sweet part, "homesick" only the sad.

Her Portuguese friend hears her circling it and says one word: saudade. A tender, bittersweet longing for what is absent — the ache and the sweetness together, in a single word.

The feeling was always there; Mira could even place it on the map (a little unpleasant, low energy, a quiet ache). What she lacked was the WORD — and having it makes the feeling easier to hold and to share.

That is what WorldFeels is: not that some languages "feel more", but that each one names a different set of places on the same map. A bigger vocabulary is a map with more labels.

Everyone feels across the same map. What differs is how many places their language has named — and you can borrow labels from any of them.

Explore the words →