hanshenning 15 hours ago

In some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile

https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile

2
culebron21 5 hours ago

Russian speakers can produce the same, basically its cognate, папабельный (papabelniy), using the borrowed suffix -bel- (same as -bile), and Russian suffix -n- (passive voice maybe), plus the ending.

Examlpe of pure Russian word: смотрибельный (smotribelniy) = watcheable. Root smotr- (Slavic root, "to watch") + suffix -bel-, + -n- + gender ending.

I bet the German -bar suffix and Latin -bil- are cognates.

umanwizard 13 hours ago

This word is widely known in English too, at least among people who follow papal elections. I’m not sure whether it’d count as “an English word originally loaned from Italian” (like “pasta”) or “an Italian word that a lot of English-speakers recognize” (like “buongiorno”), but it is there — probably somewhere in between those two extremes.