The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Most of what we feel goes unspoken for lack of a word – the ache you can't place, the mood that arrives unannounced, the thought you've never said aloud.

John Koenig has spent over a decade naming them. What began as his blog in 2009 grew into a video series and, in 2021, a New York Times bestselling book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Inspired by his project, this site allows all of us to create new words of our own – each built like it had always belonged. Some will describe something you were sure was yours alone. Most of us are carrying the same unnamed things, just quietly.

Read one, and you might feel a little less alone in it. Read a few, and the world starts to feel different.

"I read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."

—Steven Wright

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Featured Word

Nilous

adj.

anxious to imagine how many times you must’ve barely avoided catastrophe—the morning you missed the bus that later went on to crash, the day you stayed onshore when it was a bit too rough out there—which makes it feel like something of a fluke that you’ve survived this long, as if you’re on an unbroken streak of coin flips, heads after heads after heads, wondering when your luck is going to run out.

Old English nigh, almost + nihil, nothing. Pronounced “nahy-lis.”

Featured Chapter:

Between Living and Dreaming