Finnish IRL

Things worth knowing about

Löyly, mökki, sisu, kalsarikännit, pulla. The words that are really about a thing Finns do, and the thing needs explaining more than the word does.

8 words

kaamos - a woman walking a dog along a snowy road at midday under the deep blue sky of the Finnish polar night, a street lamp already lit
kaamos Not "dark winter", and the distinction is one Finns will correct you on
kalsarikännit - a man in a knitted cardigan and underwear in an armchair with a beer, thawing spring fields through the window
kalsarikännit Trousers off, curtains shut, nowhere to be
Kela - a man sitting alone in a row of plastic chairs in a Kela waiting room holding a paper queue ticket, snow through the glass door
Kela The letter arrives before you have worked out who sent it
kippis - two women touching beer glasses across a table on a Finnish summer terrace, a lake and birches behind them in the late evening light
kippis The glass goes over your shoulder before the shot goes down
löyly - a man on a sauna bench tipping a ladle of water onto the hot stones while the younger man beside him braces
löyly The word meant soul for four thousand years before it meant steam
mökki - a man standing on the steps of a small red Finnish summer cottage with a coffee cup, a lake glinting through the birches
mökki Half a million of them, and the rules are all unwritten
sauna - a man in a towel sitting with a beer outside a small wood-fired Finnish sauna, steam off his shoulders and deep snow all round
sauna More saunas than cars, and one rule everyone actually enforces
sisu - a woman in a reflective work jacket pushing a bicycle up a slushy hill into driving sleet, a plain Finnish apartment block behind her
sisu The noun is the export. Finns reach for a different form of it

Some words are only hard because the thing behind them is unfamiliar. Löyly is not steam, it is the specific burst of heat off the sauna stones and it has its own etymology and its own etiquette. Mökki is not a cottage in the English sense. Sisu has been sold back to Finns as a marketing word and they have opinions about it.

So these pages spend less time on register and more on the thing itself - what it is, when it happens, roughly what it costs, what it is called elsewhere in the country. The word is usually the easy half.

The famous ones are famous abroad, not at home

A handful of Finnish words have had an international career: sisu, kalsarikännit, löyly, and increasingly the untranslatable-word listicle circuit generally. It is worth knowing that the version circulating abroad is often a good deal more romantic than the domestic one, and that Finns can be dry about it.

That gap is genuinely useful content rather than a caveat. Knowing that sisu is a real word with a real meaning AND that it has been thoroughly commercialised is what lets you use it without sounding like a tourism brochure.

These are also the highest-reach pages on the site, which is precisely why they are word cards and not blog posts. Somebody arriving from a list of untranslatable words should land on the product, not on an article about the product.

Common questions

Is sisu really untranslatable?

Not quite, but no single English word covers it. It is closest to stubborn endurance - continuing past the point where continuing stopped being reasonable. Finns use it much less reverently than the export version suggests.

What is the difference between sauna and löyly?

The sauna is the room. Löyly is the wave of heat and steam that comes off the stones when water hits them, and it is a countable thing you can ask for more of. Getting this distinction right is a small but reliable way to sound like you have been.

Do Finns actually do kalsarikännit?

Yes, and they find it funny that the rest of the world adopted the word. It means drinking at home in your underwear with no intention of going out, and it is affectionate self-description rather than a real tradition.

Why does one Finnish word need a whole page?

Because the word is not the hard part. Explaining mökki takes a paragraph about what a Finnish summer actually looks like, and without it the translation "cottage" leaves you with the wrong picture entirely.

More questions →