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

Keta

a hand reaching through paper with a flower drawing

n.

a random image from your distant past that leaps back into your attention, that doesn’t mean much of anything but is somehow able to keep fighting against the current, swimming back and forth in your mind, still developing.

After a species of salmon, Oncorhynchus keta, which “run” upstream to spawn every year, leaping back to the place they were born; they’re not worth much commercially, but the ketas don’t know that. When we look back on our lives, it’s not just the moments that we remember, not the grand gestures and catered ceremonies, or the world we capture poised and smiling in photos. It’s the little things—the minutes—the cheap raw material of ordinary time. Pronounced “kay-tuh.”

Featured Chapter:

Between Living and Dreaming