The map is universal. The words are not.
A 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
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.
How does Mira treat the discovery?
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.
Collect the words
Cast, stories & more
A case · you decide
Joon and Mira explain a feeling with no English word
Joon & Mira — seventeen, Mira's friend, trying to explain a word from his family's language
Mira misses sobremesa: the long, easy time at the table after a meal, when nobody rushes off. Joon wants to explain a Korean word, jeong, a deep bond of care that grows between people over time.
Untranslate is the feeling with no English word at all.
Loanword is the word borrowed whole because a phrase never quite fits.
How should they explain their words to friends?
The feeling map is shared. The words for it are not, and that is worth knowing.
A case · you decide
Sofía and Mira and the tender word
Sofía & Mira — seventeen, bilingual, who noticed that a word sounds loving at home and cold at school
Sofía's grandmother calls her by a nickname that means "little fat one," and it is pure affection. When a classmate overheard it and repeated it, it sounded like an insult.
Register is the tone a word carries: tender in one mouth, rude in another.
Cognate warns about the look-alike trap: a word that seems to mean one thing can mean something else across languages or settings.
How should Sofía explain it to the classmate?
A word carries its speaker with it. Tone is meaning too.