About

There is a particular relief in learning that a feeling has a name. That the thing you assumed was a private malfunction has been catalogued — that somewhere, some language got there first and filed it properly.

The Human Diary is a dictionary of those feelings, and a story for each one.

Every morning, one word. Its definition, its origin, and a piece of short fiction that earns it. Not an explanation of the feeling. A demonstration.

What a word is

Some of these words are real and very old. Saudade has been doing heavy lifting in Portuguese for six hundred years. Some are ours — named here because the feeling existed and no word did.

Every entry says which it is. A borrowed word says where it came from. One of ours says so plainly. Where a word is popular but shaky, the page says that too — Razbliuto is repeated everywhere as Russian, and linguists cannot find it in a Russian dictionary, so we publish it as a useful English coinage and tell you as much.

We would rather be dull and correct than elegant and invented.

What this is not

It is not a diagnosis. The experiences described here are literary and psychological, not clinical, and nothing on this site assesses anyone’s mental health. Where a term is a real research concept, the page says so and says what it is not.

It is not pornography. The stories are about desire among many other things, and they are written to be read rather than to arouse.

And the numbers here are real. The counts on this site are live queries, not aspirations. Today there are 156 experiences and 83 stories, which is fewer than there will be and exactly as many as there are.

Your stories

If you have a word of your own, or an experience that has been waiting for one, send it to us. Every submission is read by a person before it appears anywhere.

You can publish under a name or anonymously. Anonymous means anonymous: no identifier on the story, nothing on your profile, no route from the page back to you.

There is a word for what you felt.