Collected from everywhere. Arranged with care.
I’ve always collected words the way some people collect records or vintage maps — not for utility, but for the pure pleasure of the thing. The way a word sounds. The surprise of where it came from. The feeling of finally having a name for something you’ve always felt but couldn’t quite articulate.
For a long time I kept them in notebooks and spreadsheets — words I’d encountered in books, conversations, half-remembered from something I’d read years ago. Over two thousand books with highlights. Hundreds of words with their etymologies traced, their meanings unpacked, their memory hooks worked out. All of it sitting somewhere, waiting.
The best words don’t just describe the world — they expand it. When you learn that sonder means the realization that every stranger has a life as vivid as your own, something shifts. The word doesn’t just name a feeling. It makes the feeling possible in a new way.
Delighted by Words exists because I wanted a place to put all of this — somewhere that treated words the way they deserve to be treated. Not as entries in a database. Not as vocabulary to be memorised. But as doorways. Each one opening into a story, a culture, a century, or a feeling that finally has a name.
Every word here comes with its full story — where it came from, how it travelled through languages, what it sounded like before it was English. It comes with a memory hook, because the point isn’t just to know a word for five minutes — it’s to carry it with you. And it comes with connections to other words, other ideas, other further reading worth disappearing into.
This isn’t a dictionary. Dictionaries are filing systems. This is more like a shelf of words someone actually loved enough to keep — each one chosen, each one arranged with the next one in mind.
There are also six word games built around curiosity rather than repetition — because the best way to learn a word is to play with it. And a growing collection of useful tools that have nothing to do with words at all, except that they were built by the same obsessive instinct: if something is harder than it needs to be, fix it.
A word I keep coming back to is vellichor — the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, full of books you’ll never have time to read. I love it because it names something real, something you’ve definitely felt, that had no name until someone gave it one. That’s what language does at its best. That’s what I’m trying to collect here.
If any of this resonates — if you’re the kind of person who underlines passages not because you’ll need them later but because you can’t bear to let the feeling pass without marking it — then you’re exactly who this is for. Come and explore. There’s a lot to find.