The Verification Venue · a record-correction
The Word Was Younger Than the Feeling
Type "is boredom modern?" into a search box and you'll be told, often, that Dickens invented the word in Bleak House. He didn't — and the feeling it names had names a thousand years before him. Here are names for related experiences across nineteen centuries; whether they name the same feeling remains disputed. Select any marker; read its source notes. The dates mix attestations, approximate eras, and the date of an engraving; none establishes a word’s birthday.
One axis · 1 → 2000 CE
How far back does the noun "boredom" actually go?
The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest literary citation is Dickens — which is exactly why people say he coined it. But a dictionary's first citation is the earliest quotation its editors happened to find: a floor, not a birthday. Lower it.
“My Lady, whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated by Volumnia this evening…”
This is the line behind the “Dickens coined it” story.
The check
Two gaps, recomputed in research/boredom-word/build.mjs from the selected attestation dates and era estimates (run it; it prints these):
• The verb bore ("to weary") is attested 1768; Etymonline dates the state sense
of boredom to 1845: 77 years between those dates. English already had
bore as a state noun in 1766.
• The Roman-era marker for taedium vitae (~50 CE) sits roughly 1,795 years
before that 1845 sense-date (≈1,470 years from the ~375 CE marker for acedia, the
4th-century monks' "noonday demon"). These are spans between selected markers.
Honest about its own thesis: the dates mix attestations, era estimates, and Dürer’s 1514 engraving. The "~50 CE" for taedium vitae is the era Seneca wrote, not the phrase's first attestation; ~375 CE likewise marks the era of the monks’ acedia. These estimates fix an order of magnitude, not precise dates. And whether acedia, ennui, Langeweile and boredom are even "the same feeling" is a live scholarly dispute (Spacks; Toohey; Svendsen; Goodstein) — this page lays out the names and the debate; it does not declare them identical.