Cool words from around the world (part 2)

It's been several years since I last featured cool words from around the world on the Charles Fudgemuffin blog, but finally the wait is over! That's a long-winded and overly dramatic way of saying that this week's blog post is once again on the theme of cool words from around the world.

Mmm, strawberries.

1) Earth berries

In Norwegian, strawberries are known as 'jordebær' which literally translates as 'earth berry'. Although it's a cool name for strawberries, it's also a weird name, because unlike root crops like carrots, beetroot, turnip, etc, strawberries don't actually grow directly in the ground.

That said, strawberries have no connection to straw, so I suppose the English word is just as weird!

2) Earworm

Have you ever had an annoyingly catchy song stuck in your head which you can't get rid of? If you have, then you may be interested to know that in German they would rather appropriately call that an 'ohrwurm' which literally translates as an 'earworm'.

Some examples of earworms include Baby Shark, the Macarena, and of course Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley. Apologies if I've 'unintentionally' put one of those earworms into your head. ** shifty eyes **

An adult shark. Not a baby shark.
Do do, do do do do...

3) Dog fish

In Turkish, the word for shark literally translates as 'dog fish'. All I can say is they must have some strange looking dogs in Turkey!

4) A long word for a long vehicle

In Hindi, the term for 'train' is 'sahasra chakra louh path gaamini', which is quite long-winded, but it's certainly accurate, because it literally translates as ' lots of wheels on an iron road'.

5) Strangely named city

The capital of Denmark is Copenhagen, but in Danish it's called København. This sounds sensible enough until you learn that the literal translation of København is 'buy a harbour' which is a strange term to use for the name of a city!

A cat and a dog.
Or for the benefit of any Greek readers, chair legs.

6) Weird weather

In English if it was raining heavy we would say it was raining cats and dogs. However, in Greek they would say, 'It's raining chair legs!'.

This makes no sense of all but to be fair, neither does the English saying!

7) Sea horse

In Arabic, hippos are known as either the 'horse of the river' or the 'horse of the sea'. If I was a horse, I'd be quite offended to be compared to a hippo!

8) Lantern by name, jelly by nature

Sticking with Arabic, a jellyfish is known as the 'lantern of the sea' which is a pretty cool way to describe jellyfish as they are kind of lantern shaped.

Going down.

9) Going down?

A way of saying 'Going down?' in Filipino is 'Bababa ba?'

That's useful to know, because if I got in a lift in the Philippines and someone said to me, 'Bababa ba?', I'd think they were singing to themselves!

10) Handshoe

Finally, in Dutch the word for glove is 'handschoen' which as you can probably guess literally translates as 'hand shoe'. If you ask me that's the perfect way to describe a glove. In fact it's so perfect that it fits like a glove. Or perhaps I should say, it fits like a hand shoe!

You can find more cool words from around the world by travelling the world (but check first to see if your government currently allow it), and chatting with cool foreign people about other languages. Alternatively, check out my previous blog posts:
Cool words from around the world (part 1)
True or false quiz: Cool foreign words