Good day to you all, bodacious bookworms! Welcome to this episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Today we are examining what is referred to as a ‘made up word’, and I know what you might be thinking, ‘well, aren’t all words made up?’ and though in a way you are correct, cheery listener, some words have evolved from many centuries over time, and passed through several languages before becoming the established word we know today. Other words are simply made up, created in modern space out of almost nowhere. Today’s word is an example of such a word; today’s word is: vellichor.

Vellichor is ‘the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time’. As previously mentioned, this word is invented, or created, rather than having evolved through time and language. Vellichor is notably found in ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’, by John Koenig,which is an ongoing online collection of invented words, each representing an attempt to find a word to fit a concept for which our vocabulary is currently lacking. You could say, ‘Goodness me, this store just fills me with vellichor, how about you?’ The word seems to begin appearing on Twitter somewhere in 2013. 

Other words that feature on The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows include ‘lillo’, a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other, ‘scabulous’, proud of a scar on your body, which is an autograph signed to you by a world grateful for your continued willingness to play with her, even when you don’t feel like it and ‘opia’, the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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