Nostalgia

How to spell nostalgia

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nostalgia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nostalgia mean?

1. nounA sentimental, bittersweet longing for the past or for a remembered time, place, or experience.

Nostalgia in a sentence

• Hearing that old song filled her with nostalgia for her university years.

• The photographs of the seaside town stirred a wave of nostalgia in him.

Where does nostalgia come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a deliberate scholarly coinage rather than an ancient inheritance. In 1688 a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer assembled it from two Greek elements: nostos, meaning a return home or homecoming, and algos, meaning pain or ache. He fused them into the Neo-Latin nostalgia to name what he treated as a genuine medical illness, the severe homesickness suffered by Swiss mercenaries serving far abroad. For a long time the term stayed in the language of physicians, describing a wasting longing for one's native place. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did its meaning soften and broaden, shifting from homesickness for a place to a fond, bittersweet yearning for an earlier time. The same nostos survives in the literary word for a homecoming tale, and the -algia ending is the very piece that turns up in medical words like neuralgia, which is worth remembering because it is the gia spelling that trips writers up.

How the word is built

• nost- (from Greek nostos: a return home)
• -algia (from Greek algos: pain, ache)