The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

288 pages

English language

Published June 30, 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Limited.

ISBN:: 9781501153648

(1 review)

Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.”

If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, relatable, and …

Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.”

If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, relatable, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition—from “astrophe,” the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to “zenosyne,” the sense that time keeps getting faster.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives. With a gorgeous package and beautiful illustrations throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and human beings everywhere.

4 editions

Jens Finkhäuser reviewed The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

Great addition to The Devil's Dictionary or The Meaning of Liff

5 stars

I draw the comparison to the above two books because it's a similar approach: you make a kind of dictionary of interesting stuff, or through a lens that makes the stuff interesting. In the case of this book, it's about "obscure sorrows", but -- as the foreword notes -- it's not actually about sad things.

Rather it is about naming those moments in life where the absurdity of common moments hits you, and opens you up, if just for a moment, to the melancholy of contemplating the point of it all. It can be joyful, it can be sad, but it's definitely an experience.

I find it's perfect for the bathroom shelf (all book lovers have a bathroom shelf, right?). You can read a page, consider a word or five, how it applies to your life. And then the moment passes.

I can't claim to have read the thing in …

I draw the comparison to the above two books because it's a similar approach: you make a kind of dictionary of interesting stuff, or through a lens that makes the stuff interesting. In the case of this book, it's about "obscure sorrows", but -- as the foreword notes -- it's not actually about sad things.

Rather it is about naming those moments in life where the absurdity of common moments hits you, and opens you up, if just for a moment, to the melancholy of contemplating the point of it all. It can be joyful, it can be sad, but it's definitely an experience.

I find it's perfect for the bathroom shelf (all book lovers have a bathroom shelf, right?). You can read a page, consider a word or five, how it applies to your life. And then the moment passes.

I can't claim to have read the thing in its entirety. But what it makes it a five start recommendation to me is that, so far, I haven't found a single word here yet that I could not relate to.

In addition to that, these words are rarely just neologisms. Rather, they're well researched neologisms, drawing from older roots of words, or from words common in widely disparate fields that unexpectedly collide here. For anyone like myself who enjoys tidbits of etymology, there's the additional joy of discovering how each word is constructed.

Totally worth buying and keeping. Not a light read, though.