The Accidental Lexicon: On the Words We Collect Without Meaning To

I’ve been keeping notes for nearly two decades, and in that time, I’ve built systems with the best of them. I’ve tried every app, color-coded every category, and perfected my tagging conventions. I imagined a digital garden of impeccably organized thoughts, a perfect reflection of a well-ordered mind. But recently, I noticed a strange and wonderful thing. My most valuable collection isn’t the one I meticulously curated. It’s the one I created by accident.

I call it my Accidental Lexicon. Scattered across old notebooks, digital scraps, and the margins of PDFs is an untidy heap of words. Not important concepts or resonant quotes, but simply words I didn’t know. A lifetime of stumbling across unfamiliar vocabulary and jotting it down, almost as a reflex. Palimpsest. Apophenia. Pareidolia. Susurrus. I’d hear a word in a podcast, read it in an article, and without much thought, I’d capture it. The intention was always the same: “Look that up later.” But “later” rarely came with a dictionary. It came with more reading, more words to add to the pile. The looking-up became secondary to the collecting.

For years, I saw this as a failure of my system—a graveyard of good intentions. These entries were orphans, lacking the context or connection that gave my other notes value. They were inert data points, not knowledge. But then I started reading through them, not to learn their definitions, but simply to observe the collection itself. The words began to form a different kind of map. It wasn’t a map of what I knew, but a map of my intellectual wanderings, a record of the linguistic terrain I had passed through.

A History of Curiosity

The Lexicon tells a story my organized notes could never capture. There’s a cluster of words from my brief, intense dive into weaving terminology: heddle, sley, shuttlecock. Another batch from a summer of reading about geology: horst, graben, escarpment. A single, lovely word, “petrichor,” appears on a dozen different scraps from a dozen different years, as if my mind kept stumbling upon it anew, a scent I kept forgetting but was always happy to rediscover.

This unplanned archive is a purer record of curiosity. My deliberate note-taking is goal-oriented; it serves a project, supports an argument. But the Lexicon is curiosity for its own sake. It captures the moments when my attention was snagged by something beautiful, strange, or simply unknown. There is no pressure to synthesize or utilize these words. They exist simply because they prompted a pause, a moment of not-knowing that was worth marking.

In a world that champions intentionality in our information diets—curate your feeds, build your second brain, optimize your workflow—there is a quiet virtue in this accidental collection. It is the antithesis of the performance of knowledge. It is a private museum of my own ignorance, a celebration of the gaps. The value isn’t in closing those gaps by finally googling the definition of “benthos.” The value is in the act of noticing the gap itself. My Accidental Lexicon reminds me that the mind’s most fertile ground is often the unplotted, uncultivated patch where things simply land and are allowed to be, undefined and full of potential.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: