A word found you
noun
The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
After moving countries. People ask how it was. I say "good." It is not that I don't want to tell them. It is that I don't know where to start.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Tap for another word
noun
The profound realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Sitting on the tube at rush hour, watching faces. Everyone going somewhere that matters to them. I felt very small and very connected at once.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
noun
The occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
A wrong turn in Lisbon led me to the only bookshop I've ever cried in. I wasn't looking for it. It was looking for me.
Horace Walpole, 1754
noun
The eerie, unsettling atmosphere of a place that is usually busy but is now abandoned.
My school, visited years later on a holiday weekend. The hallways exactly as I remembered. No one there.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
noun
A Danish quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment.
A Sunday in February. Candles, soup, the rain outside. Nothing to do and nowhere to be. This is what I have been trying to recreate ever since.
Danish
noun
A Japanese worldview centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
A cracked teacup my mother refused to throw away. It pours perfectly. The crack is part of its history now.
Japanese
A word stops you in a book.
Someone names a feeling you have carried for years.
You write it down. It vanishes by morning.
Words that stop you deserve more than a screenshot.
Save the word and the moment it found you. Each day, one word from your collection resurfaces. Not when you ask for it. When you need it.
Not ready yet? Browse the collection, no account needed.
Start tonight
Save it here with the moment it found you.
It will find its way back.