01
Soft
Habibi
ha·BEE·bee · soft
Whispered gently, “habibi” becomes a quiet “my love” — the warmest way to hold someone close with a single word.
Shifts in meaning
Soft & low → tenderness, closeness, a goodnight kind of love.
The COMPASS OF EMOTION
A GUIDE for curious kids
Habibi
Feel Everything, Say Habibi
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THE ATLAS OF EMOTION —
The Atlas
To name a thing is a sincere attempt to know it.
Habibi is an interactive instrument for understanding emotions through language — an explorative guide, still in research and development, into the hidden worlds that live within us: worlds of feeling, of the sounds we use to name them, and of the connections between them.
Words have a curious way of making the invisible visible. They give shape to what happens inside us, help us recognise and name our feelings, and allow us to share our inner world with others.
Therefore, words are never just words. They are fragments of us, carrying little pieces of the world as we see it, feel it, and make sense of it.
The Atlas is where our journey begins.
We set off on Planet Earth, a world of billions of people and thousands of languages, each with its own way of naming what we sense and feel. We follow words across continents and oceans, listening to their sounds, tracing their histories, and discovering the meanings and memories they carry.
Together, these fragments draw a map of the human heart — slightly different in every tongue, yet somewhere underneath, eerily all the same.
*Inspired in part by Brené Brown’s
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THE COMPASS OF EMOTION —
The Compass
But Earth is only one small part of the story.
The Atlas was only the beginning. Now take up the Compass of Emotion, and venture further into the worlds that live within us.
The word “emotion” dates back to 1579 in English, when it was adapted from the French word émotion, derived from émouvoir, meaning “to stir up.” Its roots lie in the Latin emovere, meaning “to move out” or “to set in motion,” combining ex (“out”) and movere (“to move”).
Emotions are complex physical and mental states, involving changes in the body, thoughts and feelings, behavioural responses, and varying degrees of pleasure or displeasure. There is no single scientific consensus on a precise definition of emotion.
Research into emotion spans many fields, including psychology, medicine, history, sociology, computer science, and philosophy. These disciplines explore the origins, functions, and effects of emotions, with theories about their evolutionary origins dating back to Charles Darwin.
Emotions are inherent to being human, yet we rarely experience them in quite the same way twice.
American psychologist Paul Ekman proposed that certain emotional expressions are recognised across cultures. As a starting point, we introduce seven of them — anger, surprise, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and contempt — alongside one complex yet ever-present experience shared by all humans: love.
Together, they form a kind of compass, guiding how we navigate the world — taking shape through our bodies, voices, languages, cultures, and civilisations.
Here, we explore these shared human experiences as a spectrum of meanings, expressions, and forms that shift from person to person and place to place, while recurring across time and space.
*For a broader understanding of human emotions, we recommend exploring
and
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THE Timeline —
The Timeline of Emotions
An emotion is not a single moment in time, but an episode that unfolds.
Something triggers it, we experience the emotion in our body and mind, and eventually we respond to it.
Psychologists Drs. Paul and Eve Ekman call this the Emotional Episode Timeline: trigger → experience → response, which they break into five distinct stages.
*Based on Drs. Paul & Eve Ekman’s Emotional Episode Timeline, part of their
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The body’s first wave is short, and what happens next is partly up to us.
In her memoir My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes a popular rule of thumb: the first chemical surge of an emotion runs through the body in about 90 seconds. It is a useful picture rather than a measured fact, but it captures something true.
The rise. A trigger occurs. Your adrenal glands release the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline into the bloodstream. Your heart rate goes up. Your muscles tighten.
The peak. The wave reaches its highest intensity. You feel the full force of the emotion in your body.
The flush. Your body begins to clear the chemicals, and the physical wave naturally subsides.
Why do emotions seem to last longer?
Psychologists Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen asked over 200 high-school students about 27 emotions and found they last very different lengths of time. Shame, surprise, fear and disgust were among the shortest; sadness lasted longest, on average around 120 hours.
Two things made emotions last longer. The first was how important the event was to the person. The second was rumination: replaying the event again and again in our thoughts. Each replay can re-trigger the emotion.
So the body’s first wave is short, but how long we feel an emotion depends on what it is about and how often we return to it. When a feeling keeps being replayed for hours or days, it can settle into a longer-lasting mood.
*Adapted from the Paul Ekman Group’s
The 90-second rule of thumb comes from Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight (2008). Study:
THE LEXICON —
The Lexicon
A single word can hold a dozen different truths, depending on how it’s released into the air.
We don’t understand words by their spelling or definition alone. Meaning is carried through context — shaped by the colour of our voice, the emotion behind it, and the pace and rhythm of its delivery.
Say it slow, and it lingers like a held breath; say it fast, and it slips out like something you couldn’t keep in any longer.
Start with the eight words this project is built on. Open a folder to see where each one comes from. The last, Habibi, opens into its tones — press play to hear how one word bends with the feeling underneath it.
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Origin
Old English
Original
ġemynd
Etymology
Old English gemynd, “memory, thought”, from a very old root *men- meaning “to think”, also found in mental and memory.
Pronunciation
mynd
Reference
Meaning
The part of us that thinks, remembers and pays attention.
Origin
Old English
Original
bodiġ
Etymology
Old English bodig, “trunk, chest”. Its deeper origin is unknown.
Pronunciation
bod · ee
Reference
Meaning
Where every emotion is first felt.
Origin
Latin, via French
Original
ēmovēre
Etymology
From French émotion, from Latin emovere, “to move out, to stir”: an emotion is literally something that moves us.
Pronunciation
ih · moh · shun
Reference
Meaning
A short, strong response to something that matters.
Origin
Old English
Original
fēlan
Etymology
From Old English fēlan, “to touch, to perceive”.
Pronunciation
fee · ling
Reference
Meaning
What an emotion is like from the inside.
Origin
Old English
Original
mōd
Etymology
Old English mōd, which once meant “mind, spirit, courage”.
Pronunciation
mood
Reference
Meaning
A quieter, longer emotional weather.
Origin
Latin, via Old French
Original
compas
Etymology
From Old French compas, from Latin com- “together” + passus “step”: to pace out, to measure.
Pronunciation
kum · pus
Reference
Meaning
A tool for finding your direction.
Origin
Greek
Original
Ἄτλας
Etymology
Named after Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky; the mapmaker Mercator put his name on a book of maps in 1595.
Pronunciation
at · lus
Reference
Meaning
A collection of maps.
Origin
Arabic
Original
حبيبي
Pronunciation
ha · bee · bee
Etymology
From the triliteral root ḥ-b-b (حبّ), “to love.” Habibi is the masculine form — literally “my beloved.”
Meaning
My love, my dear — a tender word for someone you hold close.
Reference
The tones
THE ROSETTA STONE —
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone carries one decree in three scripts.
Because scholars could read one version, they could unlock the others. Its value lay in the gaps between them.
This project does the same with feeling. Love, longing, sorrow, patience, and joy are set side by side in three scripts and three languages: English (Latin alphabet, Germanic), Macedonian (Cyrillic, Slavic), and Arabic (Arabic script, Semitic).
Take melancholy. The Greek idea of sorrow as “black bile” became English melancholy. Through Arabic سوداء (sawdā’, “black”) and then Turkish, it became Macedonian севда (sevda), the sweet ache of a love song. One idea took two roads and came to mean different things.
The first stone let us read a lost language. This one asks what we mean when we say we feel.
*Open a family to see its feelings. Echo badges mark words that name more than one feeling.
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Questions