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

Ringlorn

adj.

the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

From ring, a key element in many sagas and myths + -lorn, sorely missing. Pronounced “ring- lawrn.”

Featured Chapter:

Between Living and Dreaming