Drachenfutter, Saudade, Onsay

Avoir la molle (French) - "To have the molle" is a Swiss idiom that refers to a kind of heavy lethargy that residents along Lake Geneva regularly suffer from. It invades them with a listless unwillingness to do any work.

Drachenfutter (German) - Meaning "dragon fodder", this is the offering German husbands make to their wives when they've stayed out late. A nice box of chocolates, or some flowers, perhaps, to mask the beer fumes.

Attaccabottone (Italian) - This is a bore who "buttonholes" you and tells you long tales of woe. You long to escape from an attaccabottone, but somehow it's always difficult to get away.

Uitwaaien (Dutch) - A most useful and attractive verb meaning "to walk in the wind for fun". It conjures up a charming image of Dutch people outdoors, knowing just how to enjoy their landscape.

Chungo (Spanish) - From the gypsy word for "ugly" and meaning generally "pretty bad". No translation can get across the word's almost comic sense of disaster. A Spanish joke illustrates the difference between bueno ("good"), malo ("bad") and chungo ("chungo"). Bueno: Your wife hardly speaks; Malo: She wants a divorce; Chungo: She's a lawyer.

Saudade (Portuguese) - A kind of intense nostalgia that only Portuguese people are supposed to understand. In Katherine Vaz's definition, a "yearning so intense for those who are missing, or for vanished times or places, that absence is the most profound presence in one's life".

Lìtost (Czech) - Lítost means literally "compassion" but the Czech author Milan Kundera gave it an ironic twist in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by defining it as "a state of torment created by the sight of one man's own misery". He went on: "A feeling as infinite as an open accordion - a synthesis of many others, grief, sympathy, remorse and indefinable longing - I do not see how anyone can understand the human condition without it."

Egyszer volt budán kutyavásár (Hungarian) - An enigmatic Hungarian idiom that literally translates as "there was a dog-market in Buda only once". A once-only opportunity, to be grasped with two hands.

Yolki-palki (Russian) - A peculiar expression which could express surprise, dismay or pleasure, depending on the situation. The phrase literally translates as "fir-trees and sticks", but is probably best approximated in English by: "Holy cow!"

Lagom (Swedish) - Swedish culture could be summarised in the word lagom. It refers to an undefined state between extremes, such as "not too much, not too little", or "just right". It can refer to the temperature of a warm bath, or the correct fit of a jacket.

Taraadin (Arabic) - Arabic has no word for "compromise" in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. But a much happier concept, taraadin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an "I win, you win". It's a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.

Onsay (Boro) - From one of the many indigenous dialects of India, this is a language that adds various levels of meaning to the English word "love". Onsay is a verb meaning "pretend to love"; onguboy means "to love from the heart"; onsra has a level of sadness and translates as "to love for the last time".

Oont kis karwat baithta hai (Urdu) - This proverb literally means "let us see which way the camel sits". In a sandstorm, you can always tell which way the wind is blowing by the way a camel sits. The wise camel rider can take shelter behind the camel's body.

Mamihlapinatapei (Tierra del Fuego) - You know when mamihlapinatapei has just happened. It is that look across the table when two people are sharing an unspoken but private moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. An expressive and meaningful silence.

Ilunga (Tshiluba) - This word from the Tshiluba language of the Republic of Congo has topped a list drawn up with the help of 1,000 translators as the most untranslatable word in the world. It describes a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time and then to tolerate it for a second time, but never for a third time.