sonder

What it means

A hospital elevator stops on the fourth floor. One woman holds a blue balloon. The man beside her holds a plastic bag of someone’s folded clothes and a pair of slippers. They get off on different floors, and for a second you see both of them whole: two separate weeks, each the center of someone’s calendar, and you appear in neither except as the person who pressed 6. That second is sonder.

It needs a stranger, or near enough. A friend’s inner life is already known to be full; sonder is the surprise of granting that fullness to someone you had filed as scenery. It is brief. It usually arrives in transit, in queues, on platforms, in crowds where people are visible but not speaking to you. It ends when the stranger turns back into scenery, which happens fast.

Koenig says the word can be used as a noun or as a verb, in the way “wonder” is both. In practice most people use it as a noun: a moment of sonder, a wave of it.

Where it comes from

John Koenig posted sonder to his blog The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr; the post is dated 22 July 2012. In October 2014 he made it the subject of a short video, “Sonder: The Realization That Everyone Has A Story”. The book version, published by Simon & Schuster in November 2021, gives the entry on pages 121 to 123 and returns to it in the afterword on page 253.

Koenig’s note in the book derives it from French sonder, which he glosses as “to plumb the depths”, and gives the pronunciation as SAHN-der. Wiktionary adds the German prefix sonder-, “special, separate”, as a second influence; that half is Wiktionary’s account, not Koenig’s printed note. The word spread quickly: Wiktionary records a student columnist at The Daily Illini using it in 2012, the same year it was posted.

How to use it

Sitting in the airport at 2 a.m., watching a man in a suit eat cereal out of a paper cup, I had a full minute of sonder. Casual; used as a mass noun, the way people say “a minute of panic”.

She sondered at the people on the opposite platform until their train pulled out. Literary; the verb use Koenig allows, rare enough that most readers will notice it.

What it is not

Empathy. Empathy is feeling with a particular person about a particular thing: your sister’s grief, a colleague’s nerves before a talk. It needs information about what they feel. Sonder works with almost no information. You do not know what the man with the slippers feels, only that there is a great deal of it, and that it has nothing to do with you.

Anonymity. Anonymity is the city’s arrangement that nobody knows you, and it is usually a relief. Sonder runs the other way. It is the sudden knowledge that the anonymous people around you are not anonymous to themselves, and that you are equally blank to each of them.

In the wild

• TesseracT, Sonder (Kscope, 2018). The album took its title from the dictionary; the band said the record was about a sense of insignificance.
• Dermot Kennedy, Sonder (Interscope/Island, 2022). His second album reached number one in Ireland and the UK; he explained the title with Koenig’s definition.
• Sonder Bikes, Alpkit (launched 2015). The British bicycle brand’s own about page quotes the dictionary entry as the source of its name.
• Sonder, the Montreal apartment-hotel company (founded 2014, shut down and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in November 2025), shares the name. Its Wikipedia article gives no link to Koenig, and the company is not the feeling.