ENGLISH may be the liveliest and most flexible language in the world, but it has such a limited vocabulary. Why is there no single word for a seller of stolen cats, or for the practice of trying out a new sword on a passer-by?

We struggle when we want to describe a woman who looks better from behind than from the front, we have only one word for moustache when Albanian has 27, and there is no easy way to tell someone that they look terrible after a bad haircut.

And we have to resort to Gaelic to find the one word that identifies the expectant itchiness of the upper lip as a glass of whisky is raised to the mouth — sgriob.

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

His book, The Meaning of Tingo, takes its title from his favourite discovery, a word in the Pascuense language of Easter Island that means to borrow objects from a neighbour’s house, one by one, until there is nothing left.

“English is brilliant at naturalising foreign words, such as ad hoc or feng shui; I’d like to see some of my favourites from the book in general use,” Mr Jacot de Boinod said.

The trouble is, there is not a lot of call in English for the Russian word koshatnik, because there are not many stolen cat dealers in a land of pet lovers. Nor would we find everday use for kualanapuhi, a Hawaiian word for an official who keeps the flies away from a sleeping king by waving a brush made of feathers.

We might, however, borrow a word or two from German, if they weren’t so long. Scheissenbedauern is what they say in North Rhein-Westphalia to express disappointment when things turn out better than expected, and all along Unter den Linden, fisselig trips off the tongue to describe someone who is flustered to the point of incompetence.

Indonesians enjoy a particular economy of language: neko-neko describes a person who has a creative idea which only makes things worse, and goyang kaki is one who relaxes and enjoys themselves while others sort out problems. A neko-neko and a goyang kaki, of course, are often one and the same person.

Italian has a most useful word, slampadato, to describe a person tanned to excess by a sunlamp. English in this case has two crisp synonyms: “Dickinson” and “Kilroy”.

Dutch has the curious word queesting, which means admitting one’s lover to one’s bed just for a chat, and not even for a bit of mencolek, the Indonesian for touching someone lightly with one finger in order to tease them.

We do not have an equivalent word for the Japanese karoshi, meaning death by overwork, or the same language’s age-otori, an etymologically dubious entry supposedly addressed to one who has suffered disaster at the hairdresser, or the Yiddish kibitzer, meaning one who comes interfering with useless advice.

Many foreign words and phrases are longer than their equivalent in English, usually an economical language.

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