The English word does not appear until the 1850s, and its parent word bore (as a noun—“he is such a bore”) appears only a century earlier. The French word ennui begins to mean what we call “boredom” around the same time.1 Before the eighteenth century, there simply wasn’t a common word for that feeling of frustration and lassitude that overtakes so many of us so often—not just in long lines at the grocery store or the airport but in our own homes as well. Could it be that modern life is boring in a way that premodern life was not?
