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 is the same human dullness travelling under different words across nineteen centuries. Select any marker; read the line it first appears in. Every date is an earliest-known floor — never a 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 dated attestations (run it; it prints these):
• The verb bore ("to weary") is attested 1768; the noun boredom,
1845 — the abstraction trailed the act by 77 years.
• The feeling, under names, runs back to taedium vitae in Roman antiquity (~50 CE):
the noun "boredom" arrives roughly 1,795 years later (≈1,470 years after acedia, the
4th-century monks' "noonday demon").
Honest about its own thesis: every year above is an earliest-known floor, not a coinage. The "~50 CE" for taedium vitae is the era Seneca wrote, not the phrase's first attestation — it fixes an order of magnitude, not a precise date. 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.