Doing something with soul, creativity, and love.
Doing something with soul, creativity, and love — putting yourself, and a loving care for quality, into your work.
About infusing a task with self and soul, not dutiful commitment (devotion) or psychological absorption (flow), and narrower and more craft-oriented than general passion — typically applied to creative or artisanal work (“she cooked this with meraki”). Where kefi is high-spirited celebratory joy, meraki is the loving care put into doing something well.
A loanword; roughly “passion, labor of love” (older sense also “yearning”).
Borrowed from Ottoman Turkish merak (“desire, enthusiasm; curiosity”), ultimately from Arabic.
The Turkish source leaned toward “curiosity / desire / enthusiasm”; in Greek it shifted toward finding joy and soul in one's work, with a coexisting older sense of yearning/melancholy.
Often marketed online as an “ancient Greek secret” — inaccurate: meraki is a relatively modern loanword from Turkish, not ancient Greek. The “untranslatable” framing romanticizes a straightforward “passion, zeal.”