Diegogarcity

I’ve been looking for this word for a long time now. It is the word that describes that phenomenon where something that you just learned about starts appearing everywhere. The word came to me via a new podcast that I’m listening to, A Way with Words. They had some coverage of the open mic session at the Dictionary Society of North America where the concept came up. Here’s the description of its origin:

For those of you who are wondering, diegogarcity is a term coined by Aldiboronti on the Wordorigins discussion forum for the coincidence of just learning something new, such as a new word, and then seeing it in several places immediately afterwords. It is a play on serendipity, as Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka. For this concept, Aldi chose another Indian Ocean island as the namesake.

Source: Wordorigins.org (last paragraph)

Cybil still believes that her high school English teacher had another term for it. I’d love to here what it was, if all these etymology nerds haven’t encountered it (which is perfectly possible if it’s some esoteric psychology theory).