Language
The Unlikely Success of “Sonder”
How did an “invented” word become a ubiquitous brand name?
5 min readMar 23, 2024
Have you ever been at a loss for a word to describe a particular emotion or state of mind? John Koenig understands. A 40-year-old American who grew up in Switzerland, Koenig decided a dozen or so years ago to invent new English words for complicated feelings of loneliness, melancholy, and wonder. He turned his new lexicon into a book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which became a best seller and which Koenig turned into a popular TED…