What Is the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows?
If you have ever felt a strange, nameless ache watching strangers pass on a busy street, each one carrying an entire invisible life as complex and vivid as your own, you may already know the word for it: sonder. That word did not come from an ancient Latin root or a forgotten Germanic dialect. It was invented by John Koenig, the writer and filmmaker behind The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Since 2009, Koenig has been crafting neologisms — entirely new words — to describe emotional experiences that have no name in any existing language. Words like vellichor (the strange wistfulness of used bookshops), liberosis (the desire to care less about things), and kenopsia (the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place usually bustling but now empty) have resonated with millions of readers worldwide. His work was eventually collected into a published book in 2021, cementing his status as a genuine creative force in the emotional vocabulary of the modern internet.
The problem is that his life's work is now being stolen — systematically, at scale, and often without any acknowledgment of where these words came from.
The Nature of the Plagiarism Problem
The plagiarism of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not the ordinary kind where a blog post is copy-pasted onto another site. What makes this case so striking, and so troubling, is the wholesale nature of the theft. Words that Koenig invented from scratch are being presented across the web and by AI language models as if they are legitimate, long-standing entries in the English lexicon.
When someone asks an AI chatbot to define sonder or vellichor, the model frequently produces a definition — sometimes accurate, sometimes distorted — with no attribution to Koenig. In many cases, AI systems present these invented words as if they have always existed, robbing Koenig of credit for one of the most genuinely original creative projects of the past two decades.
Websites scraping content for SEO purposes have compounded the issue further, republishing entire lists of his invented words, stripping authorship, and ranking for search terms that should, by rights, point back to the original creator.
Why This Particular Case Stands Out
Plagiarism of written work is unfortunately common in the internet age. But the Obscure Sorrows situation illuminates something more philosophically unsettling about how AI training and content farming interact with creative work.
Koenig did not transcribe or translate existing knowledge. He generated new linguistic artifacts — words that had never existed before. When those artifacts are absorbed into training datasets and reproduced without credit, the creative act is effectively erased. The word survives; the author disappears. This is a fundamentally different kind of harm than paraphrasing someone's argument or copying a paragraph of prose.
There is also the matter of distortion. Because AI models are trained on many different scraped sources that may themselves have already misattributed or altered Koenig's definitions, the models sometimes produce subtly wrong definitions. The invented word survives in a mutated form, further detached from the original creative vision that gave it life.
The Broader Conversation About AI and Creative Ownership
The discussion around Obscure Sorrows sits within a much larger and increasingly urgent debate about what AI systems owe to the creators whose work they were trained on. Courts in multiple countries are currently grappling with cases involving writers, visual artists, musicians, and coders who argue that large language models and image generators were built on their labor without consent or compensation.
What the Koenig case adds to this conversation is the dimension of invented language. Copyright law has historically had an uncomfortable relationship with individual words and short phrases, which are generally not protectable on their own. But the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as a complete, original creative work absolutely carries copyright protection. The systematic reproduction of its contents, whether by content farms or by AI outputs, without attribution arguably crosses a legal and certainly crosses an ethical line.
- AI models trained on scraped internet data frequently reproduce Koenig's invented words with no credit.
- Content farms republish entire lists of his neologisms for SEO gain, stripping authorship metadata.
- The definitions are sometimes altered or degraded in the process, compounding the harm to the original work.
- Legal frameworks around short phrases and neologisms make redress difficult even when ethical violations are clear.
What Should Readers and Creators Do?
For readers who love the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the most meaningful response is attribution. When you share sonder or kenopsia with a friend, say where it came from. When you see these words presented on a website or by an AI without credit to John Koenig, note the omission. This kind of collective correction is slow, but it matters.
For creators watching this case unfold, it offers a cautionary lesson about documentation and publication. Koenig's case for authorship is strong in part because his work has a clear, timestamped public record going back to 2009, culminating in a commercially published book. Original creators in any medium benefit from establishing that kind of paper trail early and visibly.
For the developers of AI systems, the Obscure Sorrows example should serve as a compelling illustration of why attribution mechanisms inside model outputs matter. A model that can say "this word was coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" is not only more accurate — it is more honest, more useful, and less likely to contribute to the quiet erasure of a living artist's work.
The Stakes of Losing Creative Credit in the AI Age
There is something poignant about the fact that the work being plagiarized here is a dictionary of sorrows. Koenig built his project on the premise that human emotional experience is richer and stranger than our existing vocabulary can capture. The irony is that the internet age has generated a new sorrow he may not yet have named: the feeling of watching your most original creation circulate the world without your name attached, absorbed into a vast, impersonal machine that learned from your work but forgot to remember you.
That feeling deserves a word. And when someone finally coins it, the least the rest of us can do is remember who coined it.