Have you ever experienced an emotion that you can’t find the words to explain?
How do explain feeling like time is speeding up? You know every year has the same amount of days, hours, minutes, yet you still feel like the years are flying by.
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Or the feeling that you experience when some looks into your eyes- Is it awkward? Is it intimate? Is it just plain weird? What is that emotion?
Graphic designer John Koenig has listed definitions to explain 23 emotions that we often feel, but never have the words to explain:
Exulansis
The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
Avenoir
The desire that memory could flow backward.
Sonder
The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness, an epic story that continues invisibly around you.
Opia
The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
Onism
The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
14 words that always get mixed up, mangled and misunderstood.
Lachesism
The desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall.
Occhiolism
The awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture.
Ambedo
A kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details.
Zenosyne
The sense that time keeps going faster.
Kenopsia
The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
Monachopsis
The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings.
Nodus tollens
The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
‘Forgotten swear words and my one-woman mission to revive them.’
Ellipsis
Sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
Adronitis
Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
Liberosis
The desire to care less about things.
Vellichor
The strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time.
Rubatosis
The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
The sex-fuelled books we read in secret as teens. What was yours?
Jouska
A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head - a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback.
Mauerbauertraurigkeit
The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
Anecdoche
A conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening.
Chrysalism
The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof.
Vemödalen
The fear that everything has already been done.
Altschmerz
Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had.
Do you have any more? We'd love to hear about them.