Idea for March 2025: sonder

We were inventing new brand names in class the other day. One of the students sensibly asked ChatGPT for help, and it suggested ‘sonder’. A word new to me, but with a lovely sound, and suggestions of ‘wonder’ and ‘yonder’.

It turned out that the name is already taken – by hotels, bikes, a talent management business. It’s also a film, made in King’s Lynn. But what does it actually mean?

Wiktionary has a nicely poetic definition: ‘the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it’. I know that feeling: the startling sense that everyone is actually an entire universe, and that this planet contains 8 billion of these universes.

And then it turns out, even more interestingly, that sonder is a made-up word. It was invented by an American author, John Koenig, in 2012 for his project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - a book of new words to describe all those things that lacked a name. Its mission is ‘to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life’.