Word of the day
Sonder
/ˈsɒn.dər/
noun
Sonder is the abrupt realisation that every passing stranger is living a life as wide and complicated as your own. The cyclist you just overtook has parents, debts, a favourite song, an embarrassing nickname from school, an opinion about coriander. So does the cashier, the woman crying on the bus, the man behind you in the queue. Sonder is what happens when that fact stops being abstract and lands as a feeling. It is humbling, slightly vertiginous, and surprisingly hard to hold on to for more than a few seconds at a time.
Sonder is the abrupt realisation that every passing stranger is living a life as wide and complicated as your own. The cyclist you just overtook has parents, debts, a favourite song, an embarrassing nickname from school, an opinion about coriander. So does the cashier, the wom...
Sitting at the airport gate, she felt a wave of sonder watching the families around her, each one carrying its own private weather.
Examples
- Sitting at the airport gate, she felt a wave of sonder watching the families around her, each one carrying its own private weather.
- Long bus rides through unfamiliar suburbs are reliable triggers for sonder, especially after dark when the lit windows go past.
- Good novels deal in sonder: they hand you, briefly, the inner life of a character you would otherwise have walked past.
Where it comes from
Sonder is one of the few twenty-first-century coinages to have crossed from the internet into ordinary speech. It was invented in 2012 by John Koenig as part of his web project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which gives names to feelings English does not bother to label. The word is not borrowed from German, despite a near-coincidence with German sondern (an adversative conjunction meaning 'but rather') and Sonder- (a prefix meaning 'special'). Koenig has explained the construction in interviews: he leant on the French sonder, meaning to probe, sound out or take soundings of something deep, and on the German Sonder- in its sense of 'set apart' or 'distinct'. He stitched these into a noun for the moment when the depths of someone else's life become briefly audible. Within a few years, sonder had jumped from his blog and book to TED talks, songwriters, journalists and at least three indie bands. Major dictionaries have not yet entered it, but its citations in academic articles on empathy and urban psychology are growing.
Stories around the word
Koenig says he wrote the entry for sonder in roughly twenty minutes, which gives some idea of how starved English was for the concept. The video version of the entry, narrated over slow-moving aerial footage of unknown cities at dusk, has been viewed millions of times across YouTube and Vimeo and is regularly assigned in undergraduate ethics and design-research seminars. Cognitive scientists have an older name for a related idea: theory of mind, the ability to represent the inner states of others, studied since the 1970s in primates and human children. Sonder is what theory of mind feels like when it bites, rather than what it does. The word has spread fastest in writing about empathy fatigue, urban loneliness and the strange intimacy of public transport, where strangers sit closer than friends do at dinner without ever speaking. It also turns up unexpectedly in software design, where teams use it to remind interface designers that every dot on a usage graph is a person who can be tired, or worried, or paying for the subscription out of their last pay packet. Koenig published a printed Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in 2021 with Simon and Schuster; sonder is one of the few entries that escaped the book entirely and now lives a life of its own, with citations in The New York Times, the BBC and academic papers on urban ethnography. Critics argue that sonder lets us feel virtuous about an empathy we never act on, that it is a tourist's emotion rather than a neighbour's. Defenders point out that giving the feeling a name at least makes it inspectable, and that most virtues start as vocabulary before they become practice. Either way, it is the rare modern coinage that earns its keep.
Sources and further reading
Common questions
- How do you pronounce sonder?
- Two syllables: SON-der. The first vowel is the short 'o' of 'pond' in British English, closer to the 'a' of 'father' in many American accents. The stress is on the first syllable. Koenig himself uses the British vowel in his recordings, though pronunciations vary widely depending on the speaker's first language.
- Is sonder a real word?
- It is a recent coinage that has not yet entered the major dictionaries, but it has clear authorship, a stable meaning and growing citations in journalism, academia and music. By the working standards used by lexicographers, that is exactly how new words enter the language. Calling sonder 'not a real word' is a stricter test than English usually applies.
- Is sonder German?
- No. The lookalikes in German (sondern as a conjunction, Sonder- as a prefix meaning 'special') are unrelated in meaning. Koenig drew on the French verb sonder, meaning to probe or take soundings, plus the German prefix's sense of 'set apart'. The resemblance to ordinary German vocabulary is a coincidence, and Germans tend to find the English use of the word charming and slightly puzzling.
- How do I use it without sounding pretentious?
- Treat it like any other emotion word. Reach for it when you actually felt the thing and the everyday alternatives fall short, not when you want to flag that you read clever blogs. 'A small sonder hit me on the platform' works; 'I am a deeply sonder-prone individual' does not. The word rewards understatement.
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