Book Review: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

Some books tell you a story. Others teach you something. And then there are those rare books that somehow manage to put a name to something you’ve felt for years but never quite knew how to explain. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig belongs firmly in that last category.

What Koenig has created is something genuinely beautiful: a collection of invented words designed to describe the complicated, contradictory, often inexplicable emotions that come with being human. Loneliness, nostalgia, regret, wonder, the passage of time, and the strange sensation of existing in a universe filled with billions of other people all get their own little corner of this dictionary. And while the title might suggest an overwhelming parade of sadness, this book is just as much about appreciating the strange beauty of being alive as it is about acknowledging the things that hurt.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about philosophy, existentialism, the meaning of life, and what it actually means to be a person wandering around this absurd little planet, I found this book particularly appealing. There is something wonderfully Camus-esque about the entire project. We experience things we cannot adequately explain, search for meaning in a universe that offers no convenient instruction manual, and spend much of our lives trying to make sense of ourselves and the people around us. Sometimes, we simply lack the vocabulary to articulate what is happening inside our own heads. Koenig attempts to remedy that problem, one word at a time.

And he does so remarkably well.

Sonder: A Word That Deserves to Exist

If you know anything about this book, you’ve probably encountered the word sonder. It is arguably Koenig’s most recognizable creation, and for good reason. Sonder describes the realization that every random person you encounter is living a life every bit as vivid, complicated, and meaningful to them as yours is to you. Everyone has their own ambitions, disappointments, relationships, memories, private struggles, and dreams. Everyone is the protagonist of a story that continues whether or not you ever become part of it.

It’s a deceptively simple concept, but one with enormous implications.

Think about it for a moment. Every person you pass in a grocery store, every driver sitting at a red light, every stranger drinking a beer at a brewery, and every person walking down the street has an entire universe of experiences inside their head. They have people they love, people they’ve lost, regrets they revisit at three in the morning, and moments they wish they could experience one more time. They have childhood memories that shaped them, private fears they rarely discuss, and plans for a future that may or may not turn out the way they hope.

And you know virtually none of it.

You might share a few seconds with someone and never see them again. You might unknowingly cross paths with someone who is having the worst day of their life, or someone who has just received the best news they’ve ever heard. You could be standing beside someone whose experiences would fundamentally change the way you see the world if you only had the opportunity to hear their story.

Then you go home, and they go home, and both of your stories continue.

There is something simultaneously humbling and extraordinary about that realization.

Personally, sonder resonates with me because I’m someone who spends a great deal of time reflecting on life, examining my own experiences, and wondering what it all amounts to in the end. I keep track of my reading, my writing, my work, and the things I accomplish from one year to the next. I think about where I’ve been, where I thought I’d be by now, and the distance between the two. I spend time considering the decisions I’ve made, the people who have come and gone, and the experiences that have shaped the person I’ve become.

It’s easy to get trapped inside your own head when you do that. Your disappointments become enormous. Your regrets become familiar companions. Your personal failures can start to feel like the defining features of your existence. You begin to measure your life against some imaginary standard of what you thought adulthood was supposed to look like.

Sonder offers a different perspective.

I’m the main character in my own story, certainly. But I’m not the main character in anyone else’s. Somewhere, there are people who remember me fondly, people who barely remember me at all, and people whose lives I may have affected without ever realizing it. There are people I’ve met who carry memories of me that I couldn’t begin to reconstruct. There are entire chapters of other people’s lives in which I’ve appeared for a few sentences before disappearing from the narrative entirely.

And the same is true of everyone I’ve ever met.

There’s something comforting about that. It doesn’t necessarily make my problems disappear, nor does it magically provide an answer to the existential questions that occupy my mind. But it reminds me that my perspective is necessarily limited. My understanding of my own life is incomplete, and so is my understanding of everyone else’s.

It also encourages a little humility. We can spend so much time worrying about how other people perceive us that we forget they are generally too busy navigating their own lives to spend nearly as much time thinking about us as we imagine. We’re all struggling, hoping, regretting, remembering, and trying to figure things out as we go.

In that sense, sonder is more than an interesting word. It’s an invitation to empathy. It asks us to recognize the humanity in people we might otherwise dismiss as background characters in our own lives.

And, for someone who occasionally gets caught up in the business of evaluating his own life, I think there’s genuine value in remembering that the world is considerably larger than my own disappointments.

Incidentally, I can’t help but appreciate the fact that there is also a craft brewery called SONDER Brewing Company. As a craft beer enthusiast, the name naturally catches my attention. It’s a particularly fitting name for a brewery, too. Breweries have a way of bringing together people who might otherwise never cross paths, putting strangers around the same tables and bars, where they can share a pint, exchange stories, and briefly become part of one another’s lives. Whether intended or not, there’s something rather appropriate about a brewery carrying a name associated with recognizing the richness of other people’s experiences. It’s a nice intersection of two things I appreciate: craft beer and an idea worth contemplating.

Finding Words for the Unexplainable

Of course, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has considerably more to offer than sonder.

One of the most appealing aspects of Koenig’s work is the sheer creativity involved in naming experiences that many of us recognize but struggle to describe. He explores feelings associated with nostalgia, uncertainty, the passage of time, the limitations of our own lives, and the peculiar ways in which we experience the world around us. Some entries are melancholy, others are strangely comforting, and still others provoke a kind of recognition that makes you stop reading for a moment and think about your own experiences.

That recognition is the real magic of the book.

Language is an extraordinary thing, but it has its limitations. We have plenty of words for basic emotions, yet the human experience is full of nuances that don’t fit neatly into familiar categories. Sometimes we’re not simply sad, happy, lonely, or nostalgic. We’re experiencing something more complicated, a mixture of emotions that seems to exist somewhere between the words we already know.

Koenig recognizes that gap and attempts to fill it.

There’s a philosophical dimension to this endeavor that I particularly appreciate. Words don’t merely help us communicate our experiences to other people; they can also help us understand those experiences ourselves. Finding a word that captures a feeling you’ve struggled to explain can change the way you think about it. Suddenly, something that seemed uniquely yours becomes recognizable as a shared aspect of the human condition.

That doesn’t mean every invented word will resonate with every reader. Some will inevitably feel more meaningful than others, and certain definitions will strike closer to home depending on your own experiences and temperament. But I think that’s part of the appeal. This isn’t a dictionary you’re expected to memorize or a collection of definitions you must accept as universal truths. It’s an invitation to explore the landscape of human emotion and see what you discover along the way.

I also appreciate that Koenig approaches his subject with a literary sensibility. The definitions often read less like conventional dictionary entries and more like miniature pieces of poetry or philosophical observations. The language is evocative without requiring you to wade through an entire novel to reach the idea being expressed.

And that’s an accomplishment in itself. There is a certain pleasure in reading a handful of pages, encountering a word that catches your attention, and spending the next several minutes thinking about what it means in relation to your own life.

For me, that’s the sort of reading experience worth seeking out.

A Dictionary for the Existentially Inclined

Readers who enjoy philosophy, psychology, poetry, or simply contemplating the peculiarities of existence will find plenty to appreciate here. I certainly did.

I’m particularly drawn to books that challenge me to look at familiar things from a different angle. Camus, Dostoevsky, and other writers I’ve enjoyed have demonstrated how ordinary experiences can become vehicles for exploring much larger questions about identity, suffering, freedom, and meaning. Koenig approaches those questions from a different direction, but the underlying impulse feels familiar.

Rather than presenting a grand philosophical system or attempting to explain the universe, he pays attention to the little things that make up our experience of it. He looks at the fleeting feelings we might otherwise ignore, the strange thoughts that appear without warning, and the emotional contradictions that make human life so difficult to reduce to a simple explanation.

There’s something refreshing about that approach.

Not every worthwhile book needs to deliver a sweeping argument about the meaning of existence. Sometimes it’s enough to help you recognize an experience you’ve been carrying around without fully understanding it. Sometimes a single word can provide a little clarity where a thousand thoughts have failed.

And sometimes the most valuable thing a book can offer is the reminder that other people are just as complicated as you are.

I also found the book’s format appealing. Because it consists of individual entries rather than a single continuous narrative, you can read it in small doses, return to favorite passages, and discover new meanings as your own experiences change. A word that seems merely interesting today might feel profoundly personal a year from now. That’s a quality I appreciate in books: the possibility that revisiting them will reveal something new about both the text and the person doing the reading.

Final Thoughts

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a genuinely imaginative, thoughtful, and beautifully conceived book. John Koenig has taken an idea that could easily have been little more than a linguistic novelty and turned it into something considerably more meaningful: an exploration of the emotions, contradictions, and peculiarities that connect us as human beings.

What I appreciate most is the book’s ability to make the familiar feel unfamiliar again. It encourages you to reconsider the people you pass every day, the feelings you struggle to articulate, and the experiences you might otherwise take for granted. It invites you to pay closer attention to your own inner life while remembering that everyone else has one, too.

For me, sonder is the standout concept, and its relevance extends beyond the definition itself. It is a reminder that no matter how much time we spend examining our own lives, we are only ever seeing a small part of the larger picture. Every person we encounter is carrying an entire history of experiences we may never know. Every stranger has a story. Every life contains complexities that aren’t immediately visible from the outside.

And perhaps recognizing that is one small way of becoming a little more understanding, a little less self-absorbed, and a little more appreciative of the strange privilege of being alive alongside billions of other people.

I don’t expect a dictionary to solve the existential dilemmas that occupy my mind. I’m still going to wonder whether I’ve made the most of my time, whether my writing will amount to anything, and whether any of us can ever fully understand what it means to live a meaningful life. Those questions aren’t going anywhere.

But I do appreciate a book that gives me a few new ways to think about them.

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to explain a feeling, contemplating the lives of strangers, or wondering about all the invisible stories unfolding around you, I highly recommend giving this book a chance. Read it slowly. Let the words sink in. See which ones remind you of your own experiences, and which ones encourage you to look at the world a little differently.

You might discover that some of the feelings you thought were uniquely yours are shared by more people than you ever imagined.

And if nothing else, you’ll walk away with a renewed appreciation for the fact that every person you encounter is living a life every bit as complicated, strange, and meaningful as your own.

Highly recommended. A wonderful book for anyone interested in language, philosophy, human nature, or simply understanding the world—and themselves—a little better.

GoodReads Back of the Book Blurb

“It’s undeniably thrilling to find words for our strangest feelings…Koenig casts light into lonely corners of human experience…An enchanting book. “ —The Washington Post

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express—until now.

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.

– The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (GoodReads)

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