Vellichor

I came across a number of interesting words today on BuzzFeed, including vellichor, the strange wistfulness of used bookshops, and limerence, the state of being infatuated with another person.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines vellichor as:

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.

I suspect it might be a made-up word, but it’s a good one.

According to Wikipedia, Limerence is:

… an involuntary state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one’s feelings reciprocated. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence” for her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love to describe the concept that had grown out of her work in the mid-1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.

So it’s a genuine word, though not one I’ve come across before.

3 thoughts on “Vellichor

  1. Actually, all words have been “made up” at some point. My favorite word on the borderline of dictionary is “fantabulous” (fantastic + fabulous) and I use it every day (my standard answer to the question “How are you?”)

  2. Two words I’d like to see revived are ‘thole’ as the opposite of ‘thrive,’ and ‘sweven’ – a synonym for ‘sleep.’

  3. Vellichor sounds like it would be the scent of a certain bookmaking material. “vellum” + “ichor”. Which I suppose makes sense given the odor used book stores tend to emanate.

    @joe moch, I remember seeing “thole” in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. He used quite a few dialectal words to better mirror the original Old English. It would be interesting to bring a lot of them back.

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