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Do you ever feel something that you want to explain to someone so they could relate, but struggle endlessly grasping for the unique word, aimlessly throwing in adjective after adjective only to settle for something "close, but not perfect" in the end? Worry not, because John Koenig's got you covered! Back in 2006, Koening was in college and writing poetry, when he came up with the idea to start writing a dictionary of unusual words describing various feelings that people have, but can only explain through phrases. That's how The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow was born.
He comes up with new words "to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have an English word for." The interesting words, although created by John himself, are often based on his research of etymologies of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots from various languages. The purpose of this dictionary? As Koening himself puts - "They were not necessarily intended to be used in conversation but to exist for their own sake; to give a semblance of order to a dark continent."
Scroll down to read some of the weird words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and see if you ever felt any of the feelings described, now you have a word for them! Oh, and don't forget to comment and vote for your favorite rare words!
More info: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com | YouTube
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Sonder
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
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#2
Heartworm
heartworm
n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
Galeanthropy2017 6 years ago
I know this one so well. You think you've moved on and you forget it ever happened, yet something happens and the ache is still there, small and painful.
#3
Xeno
xeno
n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
#4
Exulansis
exulansis
n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
when you want to talk about something but you give up because you realize you can't explain and they'll never understand
#5
Kenopsia
kenopsia
n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
Stella Rose 6 years ago
There is actually a name for this! These places are called liminal spaces. Your mind expects them to be full but they're not. Essentially, they're spaces without function, and that makes the brain go "uh-oh, this is weird." They are also transitional or transformative places. They are the waiting areas of the world.
#6
Waldosia
waldosia
n. [Brit. wallesia] a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago (edited)
when you're in India on vacation and thinking you see one of your friends from America like "hold up wait a sec"
#7
Gnossienne
gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.
#8
Mauerbauertraurigkeit
Mauerbauertraurigkeit
n. the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like—as if all your social tastebuds suddenly went numb, leaving you unable to distinguish cheap politeness from the taste of genuine affection, unable to recognize its rich and ambiguous flavors, its long and delicate maturation, or the simple fact that each tasting is double-blind.
Marnee DeRider 6 years ago
I have this permanently. As far as I know, I've never encountered genuine affection in my life.
#9
Ambedo
ambedo
n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
see also the complete and total zone out, a mood whose only known cure is the Vuvuzela Ten Hour Remix Skrillex Edition
#10
Midding
midding
v. intr. feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be.
Jaguarundi 6 years ago
This defines me. I'd spend the party in the kitchen, being "at" the party but not "in" the party.
#11
Chrysalism
chrysalism
n. the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
Board Pan, duh. 6 years ago
I love this feeling, what about a snowstorm, being snowed in with nowhere to be ! Got that today lol and wanted to stay in that mood i love it!! ..... then had to take 6 hours to plow myself out of the yard lol
#12
Fata Organa
fata organa
n. a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room, idly locked in the middle of some group conversation, their eyes glinting with vulnerability or quiet anticipation or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains, watching stagehands holding their ropes at the ready, actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for some other production.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
yeah one time i saw the neighbor smiling at me through his window and then i made eye contact and he just went back to the kitchen with his knife
#13
Silience
silience
n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.
#14
Jouska
jouska
n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.
Harrison Rose 6 years ago
Do most people do this when they're in the shower? I find that to be the place where I always play out my fake confrontations.
#15
Nighthawk
nighthawk
n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
*goes to sleep BRAIN *whispers "Julia from 4th grade still remembers that one time you picked your nose" *wakes up
#16
Kairosclerosis
kairosclerosis
n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.
Bluebird11 6 years ago
After I started mindfulness meditation, I was able just observe & enjoy that feeling w/o the conscious mind kicking in.
#17
Opia
opia
n. the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—their pupils glittering, bottomless and opaque—as if you were peering through a hole in the door of a house, able to tell that there’s someone standing there, but unable to tell if you’re looking in or looking out.
#18
Adronitis
adronitis
n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
literally that's me but it depends on what time like 11:59 pm "hey I like mac and cheese" 12:01 am "I use memes to hide my depression"
#19
Mimeomia
mimeomia
n. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”
#20
Vemödalen
vemödalen
n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.
#21
Mal De Coucou
mal de coucou
n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.
#22
Ecstatic Shock
ecstatic shock
n. the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.
Jaguarundi 6 years ago
I like this definition. I can remember feeling it happening as I read it.
#23
Pâro
pâro
n. the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.
#24
Rückkehrunruhe
Rückkehrunruhe
n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.
#25
Ellipsism
ellipsism
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
#26
Liberosis
liberosis
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
Conrad Strucker 6 years ago
or you can just, I don't know, punt the ball into space and go read a book
#27
Semaphorism
semaphorism
n. a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic ‘I know the feeling'—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some foreign country.
#28
Catoptric Tristesse
catoptric tristesse
n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.
#29
The Bends
the bends
n. frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should, even something you’ve worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in various thought combinations to try for anything more than static emotional blankness, as if your heart had been accidentally demagnetized by a surge of expectations.
#30
Lachesism
lachesism
n. the desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.
Jaguarundi 6 years ago
Lachesis, she measures the thread of your life. This word seems to be the opposite of her definition. Lachesism would put Gordian knots in that thread.
#31
Vellichor
vellichor
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
Marnee DeRider 6 years ago
Reminds me of a word I learned recently: "petrichor". It's that strange-but-pleasant smell of those first few drops of rain after a long period without. There is a beautiful song about that whose mood kind of fits Vellichor, too: https://www.facebook.com/DLF01/videos/10153074065487672/
#32
Onism
onism
n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
#33
Moledro
moledro
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
Marie Lemonde 1 year ago
This feeling, i know. And somehow i still wish that one day i will get to meet them. Because it feels too strong not to.. it feels like i am bond to them in a way i cannot explain, as if i knew or hoped that life would simply make our paths cross, because it is inevitable. As if life itself would have us meet. Even if i know that i am probably not the only one who feels this way, but still think i would be the "chosen one"
#34
Altschmerz
Altschmerz
n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.
#35
Rubatosis
rubatosis
n. the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a nervous ditty your heart is tapping to itself, the kind that people compulsively hum or sing while walking in complete darkness, as if to casually remind the outside world, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
#36
Anthrodynia
anthrodynia
n. a state of exhaustion with how shitty people can be to each other, typically causing a countervailing sense of affection for things that are sincere but not judgmental, are unabashedly joyful, or just are.
#37
Apomakrysmenophobia
apomakrysmenophobia
n. fear that your connections with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss.
#38
Monachopsis
monachopsis
n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
#39
Nodus Tollens
nodus tollens
n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.
#40
Occhiolism
occhiolism
n. the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.
#41
Anchorage
anchorage
n. the desire to hold on to time as it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.”
#42
Anecdoche
anecdoche
n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.
#43
Degrassé
degrassé
adj. entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of earshot—worlds and stars who would’ve been lost entirely except for the scrap of light they were able to fling out into the dark, a message in a bottle that’s only just now washing up in the Earth’s atmosphere, an invitation to a party that already ended a million years ago.
#44
Énouement
énouement
n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.
#45
Mahpiohanzia
mahpiohanzia
n. the disappointment of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the ballast of your own weight and ignited the fuel tank of unfulfilled desires you’ve been storing up since before you were born.
#46
Fitzcarraldo
fitzcarraldo
n. an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling back and forth in your head like a dog stuck in a car that’s about to arrive home, just itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.
#47
Dead Reckoning
dead reckoning
n. to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.
#48
Adomania
adomania
n. the sense that the future is arriving ahead of schedule, that all those years with fantastical names like ‘2013’ are bursting from their hypothetical cages into the arena of the present, furiously bucking the grip of your expectations while you lean and slip in your saddle, one hand reaching for reins, the other waving up high like a schoolkid who finally knows the answer to the question.
#49
Zielschmerz
Zielschmerz
n. the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.
#50
Rigor Samsa
rigor samsa
n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.
#51
Kuebiko
kuebiko
n. a state of exhaustion inspired by an act of senseless violence, which forces you to revise your image of what can happen in this world—mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface—before propping yourself up in the middle of it like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.
#52
La Gaudière
la gaudière
n. the glint of goodness inside people, which you can only find by sloshing them back and forth in your mind until everything dark and gray and common falls away, leaving behind a constellation at the bottom of the pan—a rare element trapped in exposed bedrock, washed there by a storm somewhere upstream.
What do you think ?
Jaguarundi 6 years ago
The definitions were very eloquent, almost poetic. I truly enjoyed reading these and I identified with so many of them. It warmed my introverted little heart.
Board Pan, duh. 6 years ago
I was just going to comment on how poetic these definitions sound. I would be interested to read these words used in a sentence.... I absolutely LOVE words and this post.
Load More Replies...
Deborah Nolan Gregory 6 years ago
I need a word for the indefinable pleasure that reading beautiful words gives me. When the language itself as well as the feelings they describe give such joy, there needs to be a word for that. Lexichor perhaps...
Jaguarundi 6 years ago
The definitions were very eloquent, almost poetic. I truly enjoyed reading these and I identified with so many of them. It warmed my introverted little heart.
Board Pan, duh. 6 years ago
I was just going to comment on how poetic these definitions sound. I would be interested to read these words used in a sentence.... I absolutely LOVE words and this post.
Load More Replies... Deborah Nolan Gregory 6 years ago
I need a word for the indefinable pleasure that reading beautiful words gives me. When the language itself as well as the feelings they describe give such joy, there needs to be a word for that. Lexichor perhaps...
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