Sonder

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. The mind insists on returning to its own protagonist. The world is easier to navigate when other people remain extras. Sonder is the brief moment when the camera pulls back and the extras turn out to be leads in films of their own.

— A word that did not exist —

English had no name for this feeling until 2012. That year, the writer John Koenig added an entry called sonder to a small online project he had started two years earlier called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The dictionary's premise was simple: there are emotional states that English fails to label, and the absence of a word makes the state harder to think about. Koenig wrote and published an entry roughly every week, often paired with a short film narrated in his own voice over found footage of cities at dusk.

Sonder was not borrowed from another language, despite a near-coincidence with German sondern (an adversative conjunction meaning "but rather") and the German prefix Sonder- meaning "special". Koenig has explained the construction in interviews. He leant on the French verb sonder, meaning to probe, sound out or take soundings of something deep, and on the German prefix in its sense of "set apart". He stitched these into a noun for the moment when the depths of someone else's life become briefly audible.

"The brief moment when the camera pulls back and the extras turn out to be leads in films of their own."

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows —

The video for sonder, three minutes of slow aerial footage of unknown cities, has been viewed millions of times. It is regularly assigned in undergraduate ethics seminars and design-research courses. Koenig published a printed edition of the Dictionary with Simon and Schuster in 2021, and many of the words inside found a small life in journalism and music, but only sonder really escaped onto the open ocean of ordinary English.

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 in a laboratory. 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.

— Why neologisms catch on —

Most invented words die quietly. The ones that survive tend to do something no existing word can. Sonder survives because there really was a gap. English had "empathy" and "compassion" and "theory of mind", but no single word for the sudden jolt of recognising the depth behind every face in a crowd. The new word also benefits from a clean phonetic shape and a plausible-looking etymology, which lets it pass as old.

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.

The word has spread fastest in writing about 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. Either way, the word has earned its keep. It now sits in newspapers and pop songs as if it had always been there, which is the highest compliment a coinage can receive.