You know when something's on the tip of your tongue and — as frustrating as it is — you'd prefer to try and think of it rather than look it up? There should be a word for that.

"stubborn"

There's probably a word for it in German or Swedish. I bet it's long and hard to pronounce, maybe with a non-English pronunciation symbol.

sometimes it's something that can't be looked up like a song tune or a scene from a show. i tried searching once using humming and it didn't work, but thankfully it only took a couple days for me to remember where it was from

I thought the post title was a joke. Like you couldn't remember the word you were thinking of to describe when you can't think of a word.

Is there a word for when there's a word that's on the tip of your tongue but it turns out the word doesn't actually exist?

I always experience a phenomenon in which no matter how hard I wrack my brain trying to think of the thing that's on the tip of my tongue, as soon as I go to look it up or ask somebody, it suddenly comes to my mind right before they tell me the answer.