English Explanatory Dictionary

sonder

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. 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.

Pronunciation

/ˈsɑndɚ/ /ˈsɒndə/

Word forms

sonder

Etymology

Coined by American author and neologist John Koenig in 2012, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that currently lack names. Inspired by German sonder- (“special”) and French sonder (“to probe”).

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
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