DoOS refers to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
- Accrete: grow by accumulation or coalescence
- Apricity (English): the warmth of the sun in winter
- Avarice (Middle English): extreme greed for wealth or material gain.
- Avuncular: kind and friendly towards a younger or less experienced person.
- Bikeshedding: arguing about unimportant details, at the cost of working on important details
- Bus Factor: the risk that a project will die if certain people get hit by bus
- Citogenesis (xkcd): when misinformation it put on wikipedia, taken as fact by another author in their article, and later that article is added as a citation to the
- Complect: intertwine, embrace especially; to plait together; interweave.
- Elided: (of a sound or syllable) omitted when speaking.
- Enshittification (Pluralistic): "how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
- Eucatastrophe (Tolkien): "is a sudden turn of events in a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible and probable doom"
- Filial: relating to or due from a son or daughter
- Gloaming: twilight; dusk
- Gruntle: to put in a good humor
- Ichor: God's equivalent for blood
- Impresario: a person who organizes and often finances concerts, plays, or operas
- Interlocutor: a person who takes part in a dialogue or conversation
- Jugaad (Indo-Aryan): a non-conventional, frugal innovation, often termed a "hack"
- Juvenioa (English): The fear or hostility directed by an older generation toward a younger one, or toward youth culture in general.
- Kaboomlaut (mcculley): a unicode character that breaks a piece of software
- Kenja Taimu (Japanese): post-jerk clarity / wiseman time
- Loquacious (English): tending to talk a great deal; talkative.
- Lurid (English): unpleasantly bright in colour, especially so as to create a harsh or unnatural effect; presented in vividly shocking or sensational terms.
- Mesa (as prefix): the opposite of meta (as prefix)
- Midding (DoOS): feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be.
- Mojibake (Japanese): garbled characters
- Moment of Tangency (DoOS): A glimpse of what might have been. If two lines are truly parallel, it means they’ll never actually meet.
- night software (Mr. Bandaralum): night software is not like that. It’s not written for the day job. It’s not written to see the light of day at all. It’s not written to be looked at and scrutinized by anybody. It’s intimate and personal, it’s messy and buggy. To take a look is to transgress.
- nocent (English): guilty, antonym of innocent
- Obviate: remove a difficulty
- Onomastic (English from French onomastique): of or belonging to naming
- Palimpsest: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
- Patois (French): A regional dialect of a language (especially French); usually considered substandard
- Petrichor (English): A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions
- Phaneron (English-ish): the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not
- Prosaically (English): in a straightforward, ordinary way
- Sanguine: optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation.
- Sargable: a query which is able to be optimised through usage of an index
- Schadenfreude (German): enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others
- Semantic satiation: when you repeat a word so many times it loses its meaning
- Setsunai (Japanese): nostalgic/whistful/longing/melancholy/sad/heartache/bittersweet
- Shibboleth (Hebrew): a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
- Sonder (DoOS): the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own
- Supplicant (Latin): someone who prays to God
- Therianthrope: what lycanthrope pretends to mean; lycanthrope only refers to wolf transformations
- Tsundoku (Japanses): the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read
- Vellichor (English): the strange wistfulness of used bookstores
- Vemödalen (DoOS): 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
- Watashiato (DoOS): curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.
- Weltschmerz (German): A feeling of sentimental sadness or pessimism; the weariness that comes with knowing that the world is going to let you down no matter what and there’s nothing you can do to stop it
- Wonderlanding: falling down rabbitholes
- YAFIYGI (Jargon File): coined in response to WYSIWYG, Describes the command-oriented ed/vi/nroff/TeX style of word processing or other user interface, the opposite of WYSIWYG. Stands for “You asked for it, you got it”, because what you actually asked for is often not apparent until long after it is too late to do anything about it. Used to denote perversity (“Real Programmers use YAFIYGI tools...and like it!”) or, less often, a necessary tradeoff (“Only a YAFIYGI tool can have full programmable flexibility in its interface.”).
- Yak Shaving: "what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task"
- Yuenyeung (Cantonese): coffee with tea
- Zipper blues: A depressed feeling one gets from constantly having to move around or not being able to stay in one place. Comes from having to always zip up ones jacket because they always have to leave. Depression caused by successive movement and not being able to settle in one place. Frustration caused by constant mobility and inability to maintain a residence.
English is an awfully subtle instrument. A dictionary that ignores these little shades is dangerous; in fact in those cases it's worse than useless. It's misleading, deflating. It divests those words of their worth and purpose.