Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. –(from John Koenig & the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
The real word sonder does exist, and it means to probe, and in a more specific use, to test the depth of something. The word sound (as in the water feature) is a cognate, both related to the Old English sund meaning to swim, or the sea.
