Future Words (A Non-Obvious Glossary of Terms That Don't Exist (But Soon Will))

The future arrived early. Nobody updated the dictionary.

Ever felt a pang of nostalgia for a memory that was AI-generated and never actually happened? There's finally a word for that: fauxstalgia. Sat through a colleague confidently narrating a future they haven't researched, with slides? That's futuresplaining.

This book is for word lovers, trend spotters, and anyone who has ever wished for a word that didn't quite exist.

From Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason — the bestselling futurists behind The Future Normal — comes a lightly satirical glossary of the words we're all about to need. Drawing on nearly two decades of trend research, this beautifully designed compact book names the shifts you've already noticed and the feelings you've never been able to describe, across how we love, work, spend, play, parent, and travel.

Some entries will make you laugh out loud. Others will feel uncomfortably accurate:

• Loopspeak (n.) — The secondhand dialect of people who let machines do their thinking, where every sentence sounds like a bot wrote it.
• Outsourcery (n.) — The everyday magic of handing a parenting task to technology and getting a result no previous generation could imagine.
• Datachondria (n.) — The conviction that something is wrong with you, sustained by a steady drip of personal health data confirming your anxiety.
• Doomchaser (n.) — A traveler racing to witness disappearing glaciers, reefs, and coastlines before they're gone.
• Subscreep (n.) — The quiet monthly accumulation of subscriptions you meant to cancel.

Now that AI can write your emails, invent your memories, and even help raise your kids, we need new words to understand all of it. Future words.

It's the perfect gift for the word lover who owns every etymology book, the friend who spots every trend first, the coworker who won't stop experimenting with AI, or the student graduating into a job that doesn't have a name yet. Or keep a copy for yourself. If you loved The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Because Internet, Algospeak, The Etymologicon, or The Little Book of Lost Words, this is your next obsession.