LEE-tost[ˈliːtost]
Pronunciation: Speaker: Ghost4Man · CC0 · Wikimedia Commonsthe torment of suddenly being shown your own misery — self-pity with a blade in it
Closest in English: regret, sorrow, remorse. None of them covers it.
Kundera built a chapter of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting around it and declared it untranslatable: the state that arrives when your own wretchedness is held up in front of you. Czech dictionaries file it far more calmly, under regret. Both readings are in daily use.
A real game of this word, in 19 seconds.
Played by 28 people.
One in five placed it in Czech straight away; most of the others went for Polish.
The most common guess was “envy”: not close.
Of those who bet on the translation, nobody got it exactly.
Harder than most words so far.
Contains the answers. If you want to play the word yourself first, leave this closed.