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

Candling

v. intr.

the habit of taking stock of your life on the occasion of your birthday—letting it serve as a kind of internal referendum on all your goals and qualities and relationships and accomplishments so far—which makes you want to dress just a little nicer that day, as if you’re standing before a parole board that convenes once a year to adjudicate your release from childhood.

From candling, a method of egg inspection in which an egg is backlit with a candle flame to reveal how the chick is growing, or if it's there at all.

Featured Chapter:

Between Living and Dreaming