The overwhelming urge to squeeze something adorable, clench your fists in frustration, or grit your teeth in suppressed anger—when emotion demands physical expression.
Gigil is the moment when an emotion becomes so overwhelming that your body demands to act on it. You see something unbearably cute—a baby's chubby cheeks, a puppy's tiny paws—and suddenly you need to squeeze, pinch, gently bite. You hit peak frustration in traffic and your fists clench involuntarily. You're suppressing anger and your jaw locks tight. That physical urge, that embodied impulse—that's gigil.
The word comes from Tagalog, derived from an older term meaning "to shiver" or "to tremble." Filipinos have used it for generations to describe what Western psychology wouldn't formally recognize until 2015: that intense positive emotions can trigger seemingly opposite physical responses. Your brain, overwhelmed by how adorable something is, creates an aggressive impulse to regulate itself back to baseline. What looks like contradiction is actually emotional regulation.
Gigil reveals something profound about Filipino emotional vocabulary—it doesn't separate mind from body. Emotions aren't purely mental states; they're physical experiences that demand expression. When the Oxford English Dictionary added gigil in 2025, Filipino scholars immediately noted the definition was too narrow, capturing only cute aggression while missing the frustration and anger dimensions Filipinos had always understood. The word exists because the culture recognized that feelings live in the body, not just the head.