You know all those little repetitive tasks you do day in and day out? The Russians, I found out, have a word for those: byt.

Byt refers to the daily business that keeps a life going. Brushing your teeth. Washing the dishes. Making the bed. Figuring out why your internet is slow. Calling Spectrum to get it fixed, waiting on hold, getting cut off, calling back. All the annoying little stuff.

I learned the word byt on my podcast Fifty Words For Snow, where my cohost Emily John Garces and I search for words from other languages without direct English equivalents. Last week, Emily and I spoke with Natasha Kamneva, a native Russian speaker from Moscow, about this word byt. Natasha explained that the word carries more weight than our term “daily life.” It refers to the accumulation of ordinary obligations that can crush our spirit.

The Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky famously wrote in his suicide note that “the love boat crashed into the byt,”........

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