The first occurrence of “bored” (the verb) in the English language occurred in a private letter as late as 1768, in which the Earl of Carlisle articulates his pity for his “Newmarket friends, who are bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bore,” meaning “a thing that bores,” first appeared in the English lexicon in 1778. The “bore” as a tiresome person emerged in 1812. The first citation of the noun boredom occurred in 1864, less than a century and a half ago. Cultures appear to validate their experience of the world by creating words or linguistic labels that subsequently serve to shape and codify previously quasi-inchoate, imprecise, fuzzily-defined feelings and experience. The addition of a given word to a culture’s lexicon typically occurs when a critical mass of individuals discovers shared experience of some heretofore unnamed/imprecisely defined feeling.
The relatively recent emergence of “boredom” and its variants in the English language suggests the possibility that boredom experience in prior eras of Western culture might not have been as prevalent or prominent compared to boredom experience in contemporary times. Boredom researcher Orin Klapp has documented an enormous increase in the use of the word “boredom” between 1931 and 1961. A 1981 West German study found that between 1952 and 1978, the percentage of the population who considered boredom “a great problem” in filling leisure time increased from 26 percent to 38 percent, almost a 50% increase.
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