On The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

The words I didn’t know I needed

Do you love odd, poetic, or unusual books, the kind that feel less like something you found and more like something that found you?

This week, I want to share a delightful discovery: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book that gives names to feelings we’ve all had, but never quite knew how to explain.

We all experience emotions that don’t have neat labels. A soft ache. A fleeting melancholy. A strange nostalgia for something we can’t place. When I first came across The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, I was intrigued by the title - it sounded mysterious, maybe even a little mournful.

But as I began to read, I realised something surprising: the emotions it describes aren’t obscure at all. They’re deeply familiar. Koenig isn’t inventing a new language - he’s tuning into one we already speak inside ourselves.

He builds his words from Greek, Latin, German, and Old English roots, sometimes with poetic license, sometimes by stitching together something entirely new. The result is whimsical, enchanting—like opening a book of forgotten spells.

I found myself smiling at the oddness of the words, and how perfectly they captured emotions I hadn’t realised were waiting to be named.

Words like:

Sonder – the realisation that every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Apolytus – the moment you realise you’ve outgrown a former version of yourself, like shedding old skin.

Dès vu – the gentle ache of realising that this very moment is already becoming a memory.

Monachopsis – the subtle feeling of being out of place.

Kenopsia – the haunting stillness of a place that once felt full of life.

Onism – the awareness of how little of the world you’ll ever get to experience.

Vellichor – the strange wistfulness of used bookstores.

And then there are the ones that made me laugh out loud:

Hanker sore—finding someone so attractive it kind of pisses you off.

Jouska – a hypothetical conversation you compulsively replay in your head.

This is the kind of book you’ll want to flip through with a friend, maybe over a glass of wine on a rainy evening, reading your favourite entries aloud and laughing or pausing to say, Oh wow, that’s exactly it. You might even be tempted to make up a few definitions of your own.

“If you’re feeling something but you don’t know what it is—if you’re feeling the shape of it, the tone of it, the edges of it, the hairline fractures of it—but you don’t know what to call it, maybe that means it deserves a name of its own.”
—John Koenig

In a way, this book is part dictionary, part mirror. It won’t give you advice, but it offers something just as comforting: a sense of companionship in your tangled, inner landscape.

The best poetry does this too; it lends language to things we thought were unutterable.

So, if you’ve ever struggled with a weird feeling, a quiet ache, or a jumble of emotions you can’t quite name, just know you’re not alone.

There might be a word out there for it, one you didn’t know you needed.