Nostalgic

How to spell nostalgic

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nostalgic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nostalgic mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling or evoking a wistful, affectionate longing for the past.

Nostalgic in a sentence

• The old photographs left her in a nostalgic mood for hours.

• Hearing that song always makes him nostalgic for his student days.

Where does nostalgic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to two Greek roots: nostos, meaning 'a return home', and algos, meaning 'pain' or 'ache'. The noun nostalgia was deliberately coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer, who fused these roots to give a learned name to the severe homesickness he observed in soldiers serving far from their native valleys; at the time it was treated as a genuine medical disorder. The Greek nostos is the same idea that powers the title of Homer's Odyssey, the long story of a hero's return home. As the centuries passed the meaning softened from a literal sickness for one's homeland into the gentle, bittersweet longing for the past that we mean today, and the adjective nostalgic followed in the 1800s. The spelling keeps the Greek shape intact, so the trap is the soft 'g' pronounced as a 'j' in the -gic ending and the unstressed first vowel that can tempt a writer toward the wrong letter.

How the word is built

• nost- (from Greek nostos: a return home)
• alg- (from algos: pain)
• -ic (adjective suffix)