One word for many emotions

Published April 24, 2020

If you’re happy and you know it … good for you. But sometimes the word happy just doesn’t quite describe how you’re feeling, and you need a more nuanced word to convey your emotions or the emotions of someone else.

We learn all the basic words at a young age—sad, mad, glad—but as life goes on, we realize there are many emotions that can be felt in between and beyond these words … and they don’t always rhyme either. Being able to name those feelings is important and can help us process our emotions, express them to others, and learn from them.

Here are some more complex words to consider the next time you’re having trouble describing how you’re feeling.

saudade

This noun describes a feeling that goes beyond just missing someone or something. Saudade is defined as a “deep emotional state of melancholic longing” often for something or someone that is unattainable. 

The term may be traced back to Portuguese folk culture, and there’s no English word that matches its meaning exactly, but it’s akin to a mix of emotions such as nostalgia, yearning, and homesickness.

For example, you might say, “I’m filled with saudade when I think about the days when my grandmother was still alive.”

schadenfreude

Schadenfreude isn’t the kindest emotion we can find ourselves feeling, but we’re human, and schadenfreude happens.

It’s that feeling that makes you want to cheer when someone else fails or something bad happens to them. For example, you might say, “Her schadenfreude was apparent when I tripped and fell in the cafeteria.” 

The word comes from German, combining Schaden, meaning “harm,” and Freude, “joy.”

misanthropic

When the morning news is filled with horror stories, you get cut off in traffic, or someone lets a door slam in your face, you may feel misanthropic, or angry at the entire human race.

The word stems from the noun misanthropy, which is defined as “a hatred, dislike or distrust of humankind.” If you express this feeling regularly, you may be deemed a misanthrope, when in fact you’re just a plain old grump.

The word can be traced back to the Greek word mīsánthrōpos, meaning “hating mankind.”

Beware: misanthropy shouldn’t be confused with misogyny (hatred of women), misandry (hatred of males), or misoneism (hatred of change or new things).

cupidity

When you experience an extreme desire for something, even if you already have enough, you may be feeling cupidity.

Similar to covetousness, it’s a noun defined as “eager or excessive desire, especially to possess something; greed; avarice.”

For example, you might say, “I’m filled with cupidity every time I see a fancy sports car driving past my boring old sedan.”

And yes, cupidity is related to Cupid, that irresistible, mythical god of love personified as a winged baby in the buff who shoots his arrows of romance. Both words ultimately come from the Latin cupere, “to wish, desire, long for.”

hygge

Feeling hygge is all about being cozy and comfortable. It’s a relatively new word we’ve borrowed from Danish around 1960-65. 

We’ve adopted it in the English language as both a noun and an adjective, saying things like, “My bed, with its soft comforter and massive pile of pillows, is so hygge.”

choleric

When tensions run high and things feel out of control, you may be feeling choleric.

As an adjective, it means bad-tempered, extremely irritable, or touchy. For example, you might say to your kids, “Watch out, I’m feeling extremely choleric today, and you don’t want to test me.” 

The word can be traced back to the Greek word choléra, “disease caused by bile”—enough to leave anyone feeling irritable and touchy.

delectation

A happy noun, delectation means “delight or enjoyment.” For example, you might hear someone say, “The DJ will be live-streaming an all-night party for your delectation.”

The word derives from the Latin word dēlectāre, meaning “to delight.” Delectable is also derived from this root.

nostalgic

If you’re feeling nostalgic, you’re wishing you could experience the happiness that something or someone in the past brought you.

For example, you might say, “That song makes me feel nostalgic for the skating rink where I hung out with my friends in junior high.”

The word is based on the Greek root nóstos, “a return home,” and álgos, “pain”—homesickness.

WATCH: Kids Redefine Nostalgic Words From Your Past

We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating. People work through emotions by being able to identify them and use them as signals. A lot of the time, we’re left in the dark. Enter the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the brainchild of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you were having. Here are 40 words to describe your emotions.

Onism

n. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

Mal de Coucou

n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

Sonder

n. the realization 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 like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Hanker Sore

adj. finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.

Chrysalism

n. the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.

Altschmerz

n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

Occhiolism

n. 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, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

Ambedo

n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.

Nodus Tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

Liberosis

n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

Vemödalen

n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Kairosclerosis

n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

Vellichor

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Rückkehrunruhe

n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

Nighthawk

n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.

Dead Reckoning

n. to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

Pâro

n. the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.

Midsummer

n. a feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

Adronitis

n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.

Rigor Samsa

n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

Silience

n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

Fitzcarraldo

n. an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling back and forth in your head like a dog stuck in a car that’s about to arrive home, just itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.

Keyframe

n. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.

Gnossienne

n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

Anecdoche

n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.

Catoptric Tristesse

n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.

Anemoia

n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.

Mimeomia

n. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”

Monachopsis

n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

Semaphorism

n. a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic ‘I know the feeling’—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some foreign country.

Énouement

n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

Daguerreologue

n. an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what you’re doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far away and don’t call much anymore.

Fata Organa

n. a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room, idly locked in the middle of some group conversation, their eyes glinting with vulnerability or quiet anticipation or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains, watching stagehands holding their ropes at the ready, actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for some other production.

Avenoir

n. the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…

Kenopsia

n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

The Tilt Shift

n. a phenomenon in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you put it down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths—peaceable, generic and out of focus.

Jouska

n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Ecstatic Shock

n. the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.

Heartworm

n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

Xeno

n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

Ever experience a feeling but can’t find the right words to describe it? For example: Maybe you’ve felt like everyone has a plan that involves you, but paranoia isn’t the right word since you feel that everyone wants to help you rather than hurt you. In that case, you’re feeling pronoia, a word coined by a sociologist Fred Goldner just 35 years ago.

Or, maybe you’ve felt a longing for something in your past, but it’s not “nostalgia” since you’re looking back with sadness. In Japan, that feeling is called natsukashii, and you’ve probably never heard of it since there’s no direct English translation.

Defining our feelings can help us better regulate our emotions and weaken negative emotions, but it’s not always easy to find the right word. Thankfully, there are researchers out there working to give you the right vocabulary to explain your feels—and there are words we can borrow from other languages that help, too.

Below are a seven emotions you may have experienced but couldn’t put into words. Next time they pop up, hopefully you’ll be able to pinpoint these feelings and communicate them with a little more ease.

Defining our feelings can help us better regulate our emotions and weaken negative emotions, but it’s not always easy to find the right word.

1. Dépaysement

This French word may be closely related to «disorientation,» but really, it defines the outsider feeling that you get when you travel to new places. Your physical surroundings are unfamiliar, therefore your personal feelings and behaviors might start to feel unfamiliar as well. Whether that means you find the courage to try an activity outside your comfort zone or you impulse buy a dress you normally wouldn’t find yourself buying, dépaysement is about behaving in unknown ways.

2. Chrysalism

It’s the reason why storms don’t feel as scary when you’re inside curled up with a blanket on the couch. Chrysalism, coined by John Koenig, is the tranquility and peace that you feel when you’re indoors during a thunderstorm.

3. Beschaulich

This German word is felt by those who enjoy quiet evenings, pensive and introspective conversations, and tranquil surroundings. It’s the feeling of living a simple life, especially one that results in a positive, peaceful mental state.

4. Wytai

Another feeling coined by Koenig, this one describes the feeling you have when you reflect on modern society and find it absurd or grotesque. Whether that’s contemplating how we came to have zoos or why we drink cow’s milk, feeling wytai makes you reconsider our present practices.

5. Vemödalen

This is a feeling I come across often as a writer, but Koenig defines vemödalen as feeling like everything you’ve thought of has been done before. Whether that’s a story idea, a picture of a famous landmark, or a tune you strummed on the guitar. For creative types, this feeling is no stranger.

6. Sirva vigad

This Hungarian term is for anyone who’s been caught wiping tears away by a concerned friend, only to tell them, “No, it’s a good thing! I’m crying because I’m happy.” The emotion is a mix of joy and sorrow, experienced by crying or tearing up.

7. Morgenfrisk

A feeling that any sleep deprived parent or student would kill for, morgenfrisk is the Danish word for the feeling of being refreshed, rested, and ready for the day after a healthy night’s sleep.

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Read next: Want to Feel Better? Say Exactly How You’re Feeling

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Have you ever stopped to analyze your words to express positive vs. negative emotions?

It may seem that words are just words, but they show positive vs. negative emotions.

Words are on our lips one second and evaporating the next, vanishing as quickly as they came.

Words are powerful!

Relating to positive vs. negative emotions,→Do you dwell on the bad or focus on the good?

Analyzing positive vs. negative emotions is crucial for your communication.

Perhaps you’ve heard the myth that Eskimos have 50 different words for snow.

Anthropologist Franz Boas is often credited for postulating this theory.

Although, in reality, he moderately suggested that the Inuit and Yupik languages contain a few more words for snow than other languages, and his theory later snowballed (no pun intended) out of control, becoming a vast exaggeration.

While a study performed in 2010 partially credited this theory, we now know that the number is nowhere near 50.

Either way, this fact points to an exciting reality: our view of the world shapes our language and vice versa

As a society, we develop a vocabulary for concepts most relevant to us and our lifestyle and, in turn, the words we use to tint our view of reality. The linguistic relativity hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis refers to this behavior.

So, what do our positive and negative feelings words reflect about us? About our personalities? About our culture as a whole?

What’s in a name?

How can we possibly bottle something as abstract as emotion into a word? How can we extract its essence and condense it into a single name?

And, considering the full range of emotions we experience daily, how can we quantify the words we use to express positive and negative feelings?

So many words, so little time. Nonetheless, researchers have taken on the daunting task of compiling a list of emotions and categorizing them.

Different worldwide human emotions

Tiffany Watt Smith, for instance, listed 154 mixed universal human feelings.

It is interesting to note that some of the emotions on the list retain their names in their original languages.

For example, “dépaysement,” which refers to the feeling of being away from home, both good and bad, is expressed in original French. We may be tempted to think that its meaning is similar to that of “homesickness,” used in English, but it is uniquely distinct.

Anyone who speaks more than one language can attest that sometimes there is no accurate equivalent word for a particular emotion in another language, which lends some validity to the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Each society’s unique experience conditions language and positive vs. negative emotions

Categorizing emotions

But a mere list of emotions seems to fall short when we consider that not all feelings feel as strong as others.

Some emotion words seem almost synonymous, but, at a closer glance, we may find that one word has a more definite connotation than another.

To categorize emotions, the book The Hourglass of Emotions identified four different emotional dimensions with intensities that vary across a point spectrum from +3 to -3 (for example, with ecstasy coming in at +3 and ranging over to its opposite, grief, at -3).

Other researchers have devised a similar system, identifying six emotional axes of opposite emotions that vary in intensity. Still, it is challenging to quantify feelings.

Positive vs. negative emotions

So, the elusive question remains: how many words do we have for positive vs. negative emotions?

How often do we use each?

One 2012 study published in EPJ Data Science analyzed the frequency of positive vs. negative word usage in English, Spanish, and German and found that words with positive emotional content are used more frequently.

This conclusion validates the Pollyanna hypothesis, which suggests a human tendency to focus on the positive, at least at a subconscious level.

At a conscious level, the theory postulates that our minds tend to dwell on the negative and, in a way, this study also supported that side of the hypothesis, demonstrating that negative emotion words contain more information than positive emotion words; that is, they’re more intense and descriptive.

This assumption makes sense, considering how strongly we seem to feel negative emotions.

However, in subtle ways, as demonstrated through the frequency of word usage, we are natural optimists, although it might not always feel like it.

How can positive word usage affect our psychology?

They often say that our thoughts change our behavior, but researcher Amy Cuddy has demonstrated that the reverse is also true: our behavior changes our thoughts.

If we adopt body language that reflects confidence, for example, our body chemistry changes in response and emotionally, we feel more confident.

Applying this principle to word usage, we can conclude that making an effort to incorporate more positive feeling words into our daily vocabulary will make us feel happier and more optimistic overall.

Try this:

1. Over a month:

• Take a few minutes every day to journal.
• Write a stream of consciousness style: write down everything that comes to mind.
• Do it, even if you jump from one idea to another.
• Write it down even if what you’re saying makes little sense or feels empty.
• Just get it down on paper without any filters: don’t overthink it.

2. At the end of the month:

• Read over your writing.
• Circle every positive emotion word you can find in green and every negative emotion word in red.
• Step back and scan your writing:
• Which color prevails?
• How does your language reflect on your outlook on life?
• Are you an optimist or a pessimist? 

Sometimes we speak without thinking. We criticize ourselves more than we should and dwell on our negative feelings without realizing the impact our words have on our psychology.

Seeing it on paper can help you evaluate any negative thought patterns you may have.

Be aware of the vocabulary you use for positive vs. negative emotions

Once you are aware of what kind of vocabulary you are using, you can take steps to make changes in your thinking patterns.

Continue to journal if you find value in that and see how often you can catch yourself using negative emotion words.

Write down your negative feelings and express them with their full intensity. Let them live on the page. Then let them go. See if you can find the silver lining in your situation.

Replace negative words with positive ones, interpreting your situation as a learning experience.

It may seem complicated, but the good news is that research demonstrates that we are natural optimists at heart. It’s in our nature. All we have to do is tap into that.

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