Words. My favorite things.

I was reading The Horologicon by Mark Forsyth recently, which is a book exploring the lost words of the English language. It’s pretty funny and entertaining in general, but it also solved a huge problem I’ve been having for years: it gave me the word “antelucan.” Antelucan means something along the lines of “relating to the early morning hours pre-dawn;” not to be confused with “antediluvian,” which means something like “relating to the period before the Great Flood.

I’ve been looking for the word “antelucan” for years. I like to write scenes where people wake up early or stay up all night, and I myself am a morning person, so I like to describe pre-dawn, and honestly “pre-dawn” gets old after a few repetitions. I mean, to be honest, it’s kinda old before even using it for the first time. And if you use the thesaurus as obsessively I do, you’ll learn that “pre-dawn” isn’t in it, and searching for “dawn” yields words like: daybreak, morning, sunrise, daylight, cockcrow, and wee hours, none of which really get at the vibe I want the same way antelucan does.

Before night comes “twilight,” and before dawn comes the antelucan light; antelucan is the twilight of the morning.

“Antelucan” is not the only word I’ve found that I’d been searching for. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is one of my favorite word-inventing/discovering sources. “Sonder,” for example, means, “he realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own,” and “rubatosis” means, “The unsettling awareness of one's own heartbeat.” Or "agnosthesia" which is "that feeling of not knowing how you feel about something."

You’re probably not surprised that I’m obsessed with words. I am a writer, after all, and a pretty nerdy one at that. But every so often, I find a word that has a noticeable impact in the way I think about it, a word that helps make my life better by naming an observation or describing a specific experience. It offers nuance and complexity to the way I experience the world, and I find that experience wonderful. Not to mention, it gives me the ability to describe my characters’ experiences in a more complex and nuanced way.

Life is so complicated. And I’ve never really been a fan of simplifying my understanding of it. Rather, I want to acknowledge the complexity of everything, and expanding my language to describe the things I see and experience allows me to do just that.