The Oxford English Dictionary recently added 42 so-called “untranslatable terms”—words from places such as South Africa, Ireland, and Southeast Asia that don’t have direct equivalents in English. The batch included “gigil” (pronounced GHEE-gil), a Tagalog word for feeling overwhelmed by cuteness; “alamak,” a Malay exclamation to express surprise, shock, or outrage; and “to act the maggot,” an Irish phrase to describe someone who’s behaving foolishly. It’s likely that English speakers traveling to other countries will come across many of these words, so integrating them into English serves as a useful resource to translate the “things that go on in these cultures,” according to Salikoko Mufwene, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago. Picture this scenario: You travel to South Africa and notice local practices that can only be described by local words. “You have no choice but to use those words too in English,” Mufwene says. “Because if you try to find another English word, it doesn’t match the local reality.”