The Dictionary of Things No Longer Said

There are words we no longer use.

Not because they are old-fashioned, but because the world they named no longer exists.

Sometimes they were forbidden. Cauterized from tongues, declared dangerous.

Sometimes they dissolved, unused, like mist at dawn.

Sometimes we simply forgot them. Allowed them to fall, leaflike, into soil no longer fertile.

Each silence leaves a hollow.

Each forgotten word leaves a door unguarded.

And behind those doors are things that still breathe, faintly.

Wyrm: A serpent without venom, but with memory long as a river. We stopped using it when we forgot to name what curls and waits beneath our lives. We called them by new names: anxiety, tension, dread. But none of those ever slithered through dreams or nested beneath childhood beds.

Croft: A home woven into the earth, made not built. Mud and moss. Smoke curling from a thatch roof. Erased by concrete, by deeds, by cities growing like cancers. We built upward, and forgot how to root ourselves.

Godspeed: Once whispered to travellers, not because we believed in gods, but because we feared the road. Now we say safe travels, but it's hollow. We say take care, but it's perfunctory. The blessing is gone, the gods dismissed. Only asphalt remains.

Thou: Tender second person. Singular. Personal. Cast off for efficiency. As if closeness were obsolete. Thou was not grandiose—it was intimate. Now we say you to strangers, to lovers, to ghosts. And wonder why we feel so far apart.

Kindred: More than family. A resonance between souls. We let it go when isolation became the norm. Now we scroll past people who once would’ve been kin. The word is too slow for this world. Too sacred for a timeline.

Morrow: A promise of morning. We abandoned it when the future turned too sharp to name. Tomorrow feels clinical. Morrow had breath. It carried the hush of dew, of hope, of trust in the turning earth.

Shroud: A veil for the dead. Now it means concealment. We forgot it once meant reverence. A final kindness. Now we wrap our dead in silence, in paperwork, in fear.

Eldritch: Once we had a word for the unknowable. The things that shimmered just outside our vision. Now we call them glitches, illusions, disorders. We stopped believing that mystery had shape.

Some words were murdered. Bled dry by propaganda.

Some were starved. No longer fed by use or need.

Some were never allowed to speak.

Sapphic. Hiraeth. Comrade. Womb. Riot. Witch.

Their ghosts still knock at the walls.

We dress their bones in prettier language. We label and repurpose. We forget what they once held.

We speak around them. Never through them.

There are whole languages dead inside living mouths.Tongues cut by conquest. Dialects censored by borders.Songs buried in the static.

Grandmothers who dream in forbidden syllables. Children who never learned the lullabies of their blood.Languages that ache to be spoken again. Names that remember who we were.

If you listen very closely,sometimes they still hum beneath your breath.

In the gaps. Between syllables. Like seeds.

The dictionary grows every day.

Not with new entries, but with silences.

Not with alphabets, but absences.

There is no one tending the archive.

No one transcribes the shadows.

No one remembers how to pronounce the closing word.

But it is there.Waiting.

Just behind your teeth.In the dark.Where all forgotten things return.