Baby names from “Obscure Sorrows”?

The book "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" (2021)

Ever heard of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? It’s a blog written by John Koenig, who invents words and gives them melancholic definitions in order “to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.”

I discovered the site via Merriam-Webster’s 10 Perfectly Cromulent Words, which features the Obscure Sorrows word Vellichor (“the strange wistfulness of used bookstores”). It’s a made-up word, but it’s been getting traction online, so…does Vellichor qualify as a “real” word now?

And let’s take it a step further: Vellichor sounds like Petrichor, which has seen usage as a baby name. So could Vellichor also become a baby name?

If so, could other Obscure Sorrows words become baby names too? Here are some of Koenig’s coinages that may have onomastic potential:

  • Opia, “the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye”
  • Tangency, from a “moment of tangency,” which is “a glimpse of what might have been”
  • Fitzcarraldo, “an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain” and “grows into a wild and impractical vision”
  • Sonder, “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”

Could you imagine any of the words above morphing into human names?

Update, 2022: The name Sonder debuted in the U.S. baby data in 2020! Also, Obscure Sorrows was published as a book in November of 2021, and reached the New York Times bestseller list in December.

Image: Cover of the book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021)

[Latest update: Mar. 2023]

5 thoughts on “Baby names from “Obscure Sorrows”?

  1. Morii is another word from Obscure Sorrows that can work as a human name and it does have a nice ring to it. The way John pronounced the word in the video that features this word and just the way the name looks when written down makes me think of this as a sort of a rare name that a Japanese woman would have in, say, the Meiji Period with the -i suffix that is in use with other names like Yoshii or Kiyoi.

  2. We considered Sonder for our youngest. It made it into our top 10, but ultimately wasn’t our favorite. I think it could very easily transition over to a name if any high profile person put it in the spotlight.

  3. Here’s something I didn’t realize until just recently: Fitzcarraldo was a movie from the early ’80s. The main character, an Irishman named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, was determined to build an opera house in the remote Peruvian jungle and have Enrico Caruso perform there. The locals in Peru could not pronounce “Fitzgerald,” so they called him “Fitzcarraldo.” (Source)

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