Sonder

n. the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

It is unlikely that you will find this definition in any traditional dictionary. “Sonder” certainly exists in the Oxford English Dictionary, but there it appears in reference to the slightly less existentially provocative adjective and noun “of or relating to a class of small racing yachts”.

It is the other sonder that bobs up in internet listicles such as 25 Words Every Traveller Should Have in Their Vocabulary and 32 of the Most Beautiful Words in the English Language. The word is a popular choice for text-based tattoos. It is the name of a swish San Francisco startup travel agency, as well as the title of English prog-metal band Tesseract’s 2017 album – its track “Luminary” features lyrics that sonder-ponder: “Are you alone, locked inside / The prison of your head?” Sonder is also a brand of craft beer in Ohio: “Just like every person has a unique story, so does every beer.” With its intimation of a specific mode of apprehension and self-scrutiny, sonder and its definition are clearly beginning to take hold in the public imagination.

Sonder and its definition often appear stripped of any attribution. In fact “sonder (n.)” is the creation of US writer John Koenig and is just one of many entries in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Here one also finds: “liberosis n. the desire to care less about things” and “vemödalen n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”.

Taking shape first as an online index, this viral dictionary of fabricated words now has a dedicated YouTube channel on which Koenig narrates definitions-cum-prose-poems over short films and it will soon also appear in an expanded print incarnation from Simon & Schuster. Koenig’s project is by turns stirring and playful, providing lexical and linguistic plugs for the lacunae of everyday expression. It also prompts readers to submit their own words and definitions. The dictionary’s popularity resides in its definitions directly acknowledging that sometimes language has an inadequate precision when it comes to recounting or describing familiar shared experiences.

Ambrose Bierce transformed conventional definitions. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

On the site Koenig explains that his “mission is to capture the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that roam the wilderness of the psychological interior”. This mention of demons will perhaps remind browsers of another fictional dictionary (fictionary, n.?), the roguish Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in 1906 under the title The Cynic’s Word Book, it transforms conventional definitions to satirise the notion of accepted and acceptable language. Here we find entries such as: “achievement n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust”, and “man n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.” This echoes Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas, a short compendium skewering guides to social etiquette. This dictionary, made up of various sketches and asides found in Flaubert’s notes and correspondence, harries the cliches of custom and behaviour as well as the notion that any source of information can be unassailable. In Jacques Barzun’s translation we find entries such as “Exasperation – always at its height” and “Delft – more swank than china”.

The fun and sprezzatura of these books come in approaching them as a kind of gag-tombola that also subverts the dictionary form. To consult an actual dictionary is generally to turn to “established” or shared facts. In Jonathon Green’s excellent Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, scholar Alain Rey is quoted on this point: dictionaries and encyclopedias, he notes, are often privileged with representing “an illusion of totality, of an immobile order of things, of harmony”. Elsewhere John Algeo, emeritus professor of English at the University of Georgia, suggests that the Bible and some dictionaries command a similar reverence and an implied infallibility, coining the word lexicographidolatory for the concept. Bierce and Flaubert cock a snook at such power.

In Tove Jansson’s Moominland, dictionaries are authoritative powers that verge on the oppressive

In literature there are many instances where oppressive power is associated with a dictionary. In the first few pages of Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp throws a copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary from the window of her carriage. Even in Tove Jansson’s Moominland, dictionaries are authoritative powers that verge on the oppressive: “In a cloud of sand the Ant-lion tumbled out, and, quick as lightning, the Snork popped a Dictionary of Outlandish Words on top.” Dictionaries represent stricture, constraint and control rather than creativity and curation.

The refiguring, disfiguring or disordering of a dictionary’s format has a particular anarchic and ludic appeal. In this sense it’s reminiscent of comic writing, which can be most effective when it appears in literature that relies on expected forms and taxonomies. Examples are Edward Lear’s illustrated Nonsense Botany (featuring specimens Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis and Pollybirdia Singularis) and philosopher Bertrand Russell’s simple illustrated The Good Citizen’s Alphabet (“E is for Erroneous: Capable of being proved true”, “M is for Mystery: What I understand and you don’t”). Here, skit and punchline rely on a notion of the absurd being displayed within the systematised, the unabashedly insincere within the sincere.

One can see how in these texts the purported lexicographer’s role is that of a creative agent, not just compiler of information. Similar to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff exists as a “dictionary of things that there aren’t any words for yet” and uses place names to define objects or emotions for which there is no current English word. These include: “Sutton and Cheam ns. the two kinds of dirt into which all dirt is divided. Sutton is the dark sort that always gets on to light-coloured things, and cheam the light-coloured sort that always clings on to dark items” and “Zagreb n. A stranger who suddenly clutches an intimate part of your body and then pretends they did it to prevent themselves falling.”

Radio 4’s much-loved Uxbridge English Dictionary in the series I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue also bears all the best hallmarks of nonsense precisely because it gestures towards making sense of the world and its words. The premise is simple: a panellist chooses a word and offers a definition based on punning using its constituent syllables. Thus, boycott is defined as “a small bed for a male child”; barbecue: “a long line of plastic dolls”; handicap: “a very useful hat”. Clarity, relevance and concision are turned on their heads.

And it is not only for comic effect that dictionaries have been subverted. Louise and Donald Kaplan and Armand Schwerner’s The Domesday Dictionary uses an alphabetised structure to list its apparently serious entries, but read a little more closely and you can see it is a dark pastiche of contemporary manuals designed to assist in the event of nuclear war. The fact that dictionaries are limited and limiting has led writers and artists to address and redress imbalances in the world they seek to define. This has its results in books as varied as Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s recent The Lost Words and The Dictionary of Lost Languages edited by Sarah Wood. It has also seen creative pseudo-dictionaries with radical bite such as Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig’s Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary; Cheris Kramarae, Ann Russo and Paula A Treichler’s A Feminist Dictionary and Mary Daly (with Jane Caputi) writing Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. All of these highlight the patriarchal, heteronormative, androcentric nature of society by reconfiguring lexicography in a specifically feminist or speculatively queer context.

The idea of a lexicon to lampoon the power and celebrate the pleasure of language – whether through spoof, elegy, pun, satire or simply to mark the thrill of etymological pursuit – is here to stay. Challenge your lethologica today, dig deep into your inner anemoiac and see what freshly minted coinage you can add to our vernacular.

• The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams will be published by William Heinemann next year.