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ほっこり hokkori
A small warm glow in your chest.
What does hokkori mean?
What a kind story, a hot bowl of soup or a dog video does to you. Social media loves the word almost too much.
Example
その話を聞いてほっこりした。
That story gave me a warm little glow.
Vibe
Who you can say this to, and how it lands.
Safe to use Fine in ordinary conversation.
The story behind hokkori
Here is a word that quietly changed jobs. In Kyoto and the wider Kansai region hokkori has long been used for being worn out, the pleasant heaviness at the end of a demanding day. Older speakers there still use it that way and are entertained, or mildly irritated, by what happened next.
What happened next was national television and the internet. From the 2000s onward hokkori spread as the word for a small warm glow in the chest, the feeling a kind stranger or a bowl of soup or a video of a dog leaves behind. It is now so heavily used in headlines and captions that it has started to sound like packaging, which is a fate reserved for words people genuinely need.
Get hokkori in your pocket
ほっこり is one of 308 words in YABAI, a Japanese culture snack for Android. Every word comes with its meaning, an example sentence, a vibe check and a story like the one above — in 13 languages, read aloud by your device. Paid app: no ads, no sign-up, no subscription.
