Language is vital to personal and shared emotional understanding, but sometimes it’s difficult to sum up an experience in a recognised word or phrase. If this sounds familiar, it might help to embrace alternative lexicons and become creative with metaphor

There’s a feeling that often comes to light when you stand in the beauty of nature. It might surface when you gaze up at the vastness of the night sky, observe a brilliant orange sunset fading into the sea or when you see one of the great wonders of the world for the very first time. It’s difficult to give language to this feeling or even translate the depth of the experience, but perhaps it’s the feeling Louis Armstrong was trying to convey when he sang about ‘skies of blue’ and ‘colours of the rainbow’ in the famous What a Wonderful World. Or how Vincent van Gogh felt as he brushed the deep blue sky and swirling yellow Moon of his masterpiece, The Starry Night, either from memory or, as some suggest, while a self-admitted patient at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1989. In these quiet moments, it’s possible to be both entranced and unsettled by the magnitude of the universe – intimidated yet strangely at peace. It’s a sense of awe and reverence at the scale and beauty of the surroundings. And while there might be no one word to describe this feeling, still, it exists.

Glossary of emotion

In fact, despite there being thousands of words in the English dictionary, describing certain emotional experiences remains a challenge. Some things in life are just too difficult to put into words, though it can be that an emotion impossible to capture in one’s mother tongue is perfectly described in another language, or can be created by combining the prefixes, suffixes and word roots from various lexicons (see overleaf).