A few years ago the word sonder began circulating online with some urgency. It was defined — beautifully, it must be said — as the realisation that every stranger passing you on the street is living a life as vivid, complex, and full of private drama as your own. The definition came from a project called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which a writer named John Koenig invented names for feelings that lacked them.
The word spread. People shared it with the quiet satisfaction of finally having a label for something they had felt but never been able to say.
Then a different kind of person arrived in the comments to point out: that isn't a real word.
What Makes a Word "Real"?
This is a question that sounds philosophical but is really quite practical. Lexicographers — the people who write dictionaries — tend to use a simple test: a word is real if people are using it. There is no committee. There is no moment of official coronation. Words enter the language through use, and they exit it through neglect. The dictionary records this process; it does not govern it.
By this measure, sonder is arguably becoming real. It is used, shared, understood by a growing number of people. It does what words are supposed to do: it communicates something efficiently that would otherwise require a sentence or a paragraph.
But there is a complication.
The German Problem
Koenig fashioned sonder partly from the German prefix sonder-, meaning "special" or "particular." This feels apt — the idea that each person is a particular world. But in German, sonder carries no such emotional freight. A German speaker encountering this English coinage might find it slightly odd, like borrowing a brick from a building to make something the original building was never designed to produce.
This is not a fatal flaw. English has always been a language of cheerful plunder. We took grotesque from Italian, kindergarten from German, algebra from Arabic. The origins of words rarely constrain their destinations.
What We Want Words to Do
The enthusiasm for sonder — and for the whole Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows project — tells us something interesting about what people want from language. There is a hunger for words that validate inner experience, that say: yes, this feeling is real enough to have a name, real enough to be worth noticing.
This is an old desire. Scholars of emotion have long noted that having a word for something changes our relationship to it. The Portuguese saudade — a melancholy longing for something absent — is not simply a translation of "nostalgia." Speakers of Portuguese report that it describes something that feels irreducibly itself, distinct from any English equivalent. The word shapes the feeling, or at least our access to it.
Invented Words That Stuck
We should also remember that many words we take for granted were once deliberate inventions:
- Serendipity — coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, from a Persian fairy tale.
- Scientist — proposed by William Whewell in 1833, to fill a genuine gap.
- Boredom — first recorded in Dickens, who seemingly felt the language needed it.
- Nerd — first appeared in a Dr. Seuss book in 1950, then escaped into general use.
Every one of these was once an upstart. Every one of them had, at some point, a skeptic in the comments.
A Verdict, of Sorts
Whether sonder earns a permanent place in the language remains to be seen. But the longing it names is entirely real. And the fact that so many people seized on it — shared it, felt recognised by it — is itself a kind of evidence. Language is a collective agreement, constantly renegotiated. The vote, in this case, seems to be going a certain way.
Which is, perhaps, exactly how it should work.