Sonder: A Curious Word | Hacker News Reader

Sonder: A Curious Word

dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

32 pointsparentheses13 comments

I have never ever heard this word used spoken, or read it organically in a published work. I have only ever seen it on reddit, and now here.

Which doesn't mean it's invalid or not a "real" word or whatever. But I'm a descriptivist and there doesn't seem to be much real use of this one to describe.

I have no idea where it came from and I think it's kind of fascinating. I've been seeing it for almost 20 years online, but it's almost like a few people just like it and want it to catch on.

I think at this point it's at the "stop trying to make sonder happen" stage.

Indeed. This website has been pushing this word for almost 10 years (since 2012, along with others, but sonder seems to be their biggest "hit"), seemingly just for the sake of coining a neologism.

But I too have never actually seen it used in the wild as a word, and now it's become a short-term rental startup (https://www.sonder.com/) and a support network (https://www.sondersafe.com/) -- though the second actually does seem to relate to the word. The first probably just used it because it sounds like slumber + wander or something.

The goal of the website is to coin words for specific emotions. Maybe they should focus on writing content that requires them and get that published first. Demonstrating a need and all that...

The linked article is literally where it came from — The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows project coined it and some other words in an effort to describe an emotional state that was in need of a name.

(It’s ~8 years old at this point, just for the record.)

Sorry I didn't mean "I don't know where this word came from" because that's a straightforward and in this case uninteresting problem.

I meant I don't know where the apparent widespread online interest in making this word mainstream came from. Not a lot of _individual words_ have a lobbying team but this one seems to.

>The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows project coined it

I highly doubt that, I recall seeing references to it on myspace a while ago.

'sonder' means 'without' in Afrikaans. In Dutch, the same word is spelled zonder. A common word you'd use at least a few times a day.

Wiktionary explains its etymology well:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonder

And it does so without using more than 75% of the page to show how many people reblogged it

Yes, this is much better than linking to the page of the author.

Thanks for pointing that out, I totally missed that fact actually! The linked page was not much to look at, but of course, all respect for it since it's good to have original websites like this, just didn't realize it through the way there was hardly any focus on the content on this page.

I've always read sonder- as the German Sonder-something, meaning "special" as in "Sonderangebot" (special offer), similar to Über- as in "Überangebot" (oversupply).

Funny that you mention that, because that's exactly what inspired the word. From Wikitionary:

> Inspired by German sonder- (“special”) and French sonder (“to probe”).

https://xkcd.com/610/

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