The project first started as a website-before expanding into a YouTube channel with longer definitions, and is now finally published as a book. It’s a compilation of neologisms (newly coined words or phrases) that aim to “give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for,” he writes. The gap in the English language, in particular, is what prompted John Koenig to start The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project he has been working on since 2009. But it’s comforting when we do find them. It would be difficult to find words to capture our emotions in bite-sized descriptions. They’re often fleeting, too, consuming us for days at a time and then disappearing altogether-but they’re also constant, persistent, intense, and fragile.
But sometimes they’re complex, made up of an overlap of several emotions, or seemingly too intricate and personal to be defined. Some of our emotions can be easily named, like love, pain, sadness, anger, doubt. It’s not surprising that our vocabularies are limited, given how strange our feelings and thoughts can be.
#Obscure words for sadness free#
Or even yūgen in Japanese, the awareness of the profound, elusive beauty of the things around us, and ukiyo-translated literally to “floating world”-meaning to live in the moment, free from the burdens of life. That’s contrary to German, where there are terms like schadenfreude, the pleasure from experiencing others’ misfortunes, and weltschmerz, a feeling of sentimental sadness or weariness, knowing that reality will never reflect the ideal state you picture. Take English for example, where there aren’t many words to properly express certain emotions. There’s usually a word for most things, and we’ll often come out of our search with a word we didn’t know existed.Īnd yet, it just so happens that our dictionaries don’t define all the things we experience, no matter the language. To learn more, see the privacy policy.When we don’t know a word, we look it up in the dictionary. Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project. As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). Hopefully it's more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way - for example, gender is interesting: " woman" versus " man" and " boy" versus " girl".
The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns. Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files - mostly fiction, including many contemporary works.
Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books! While playing around with word vectors and the " HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms).
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