English is such a limited language. Why does it not have a word for the rushing sound a grandfather clock makes before striking the hour or the act of sticking a finger up a chicken’s bottom to see if it is about to lay an egg? Others do.

You can understand why no native writer from Chaucer to Doris Lessing has come up with a single word to describe the difficulty of urinating after eating frogs before the rains have fallen. The very concept of “before the rains” is alien to these damp isles.

But you would think, given that most of us do it, that there might be a word to describe the time taken to eat a banana, or a noun to identify a person so miserly that, if a fly falls into his tea, he’ll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.

Adam Jacot de Boinod, a former researcher on Stephen Fry’s BBC2 show Quite Interesting, has trawled dictionaries and websites around the world to produce his second compendium of unlikely but useful words that other languages enjoy but English does not.

His new volume, Toujours Tingo, uses in its title the French for always and a word from the Pascuense language of Easter Island meaning to borrow objects one by one from a neighbour’s house until there is nothing left. His original compilation included such obscurities as the Japanese baku-shan (a woman who looks better from behind) and nakhur, from the Farsi, meaning a camel that won’t give milk until its nostrils are tickled.

This time we have the German word Tantenverführer (literally aunt-seducer) to describe a young man whose excessively good intentions suggest suspicious motives. Didn’t we used to call them poodle-fakers, a particular brand of lounge lizard?

There would be heavy use among motorists of an English equivalent of the Russian shnourkovat’sya, which means to lace up one’s boots, but which they use on the streets of Moscow to describe a driver who constantly, and unnecessarily, changes lanes.

We probably wouldn’t have much call for an equivalent of the Finnish poronkusema, being the distance a reindeer can travel without taking a comfort break. Nor would a snappy translation of embasan, from the Maguindanaon language of the Philippines and meaning to wear clothes while taking a bath, be daily on the lips of the chattering classes.

But we might well employ an English version of the Japanese okuri-oka-mi, which describes a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to molest her on her own doorstep. The woman in question, of course, might be a yubisakibijin, one who spends rather too much of her salary having her fingernails done.

Equally useful might be butika roka, from the Gilbertese tongue of the South Pacific, meaning a brother-in-law who comes round too often. When he’s not around your house he might be attending funeral wakes at other people’s; the Portuguese would then know him as a pesamentiero, one who habitually joins mourners at the homes of the deceased to get at the free refreshments.

And while English may lack some words that appear useful in other languages, it scores heavily in brevity over the Tok Pisin creole of the tribesmen of Papua New Guinea, whose expression magimiks belong Yesus is what we know as a helicopter.

Vocabulary test

Gwarlingo (Welsh)
The rushing sound of a grandfather clock as it limbers up to strike the hour

Chaponner
(Gallo dialect of French) To investigate digitally a chicken’s rear end to see if an egg is about to be laid

Oka-shete
(Ndonga language, Namibia) Waterworks difficulties engendered by eating frogs out of season

Pisan zapra
(Malay) The time needed to eat a banana

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