John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do you ever find yourself in moments where you wish you had words to describe your experiences but were unable to articulate them? John Koenig is the author of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The dictionary’s purpose is to coin and define what are known as neologisms which are newly coined words or expressions for emotions that don’t have a descriptive term for them.

(Examples of neologisms: webinar, malware, and the blogosphere)

The actual dictionary comes in the form of an actual physical book, a digital website, and Koenig’s own Youtube channel. Koenig studied and based his research on Etymology which is the study of how words are written and how their spelling and forms have changed over time. The words in the dictionary are based on existential feelings and are meant to fill in holes in the language, some originate from reader and subscriber comments of specific emotions they have felt.

Originally Koenig considered the idea of the dictionary back in 2006 when he was a student at Macalester College in Minnesota. However, it would be until 2015 that his website and Youtube channel would gain popularity when 23 of his words from the dictionary would be used throughout social media. The Youtube channel currently has 354 thousand subscribers and John Koenig himself would speak about the relationship humans have with words in his Ted Talk “The conquest of new words”.

“Sonder” is one example of a word that has made its way through the popular mainstream channels, it’s defined as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”. The term was even appropriated and utilized as the name of a bike brand, a mental therapy marketplace, in a title of a videogame, and even the name for a few various music albums.

I find the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and Koenig’s writing sort of catharsis and with every Tik Tok video that uses words from his work it only increases the chances of these words breaking into the mainstream, more examples like “sonder” will put more meaning and catharsis when it comes to obscure experiences and the feelings we have in those moments.