There are some feelings so specific that English doesn’t bother to name them. The tug you feel when you leave a place that once felt like home. The strange comfort in sadness. The longing that is both wound and sweetness. We usually settle for calling it nostalgia, but that is not quite right. Nostalgia is sentimental. This feeling has more gravity.

I didn’t know the word for it until recently, when my co-host Emily John Garcés and I explored it on our podcast Fifty Words for Snow, a linguistic expedition into brave new words. Each week we search for words from other languages that capture something English has overlooked. This time, our word was hiraeth.

The Word Hiraeth

Our guest was Dr. Steven Rule, known online as Doctor Cymraeg, a Welsh language advocate who teaches and promotes Welsh to students of all ages. He told us that hiraeth cannot be directly translated. You could try “homesickness” or “nostalgia,” but those are faint shadows of the real thing. He described it as “a longing for a belonging,” a yearning for a home that may no longer exist, or perhaps never existed at all.

He has the word tattooed on his back, where he cannot quite see it. There is poetry in that. Hiraeth is something you can feel but not grasp. It is an ache you carry, a memory stitched to a myth. As Dr. Rule put it, “You crave where your soul belongs.”

The Shape of Loss

Emily was born in Wales but left at the age of seven. She told us how she used to roam the fields with her neighbor Dawn, carrying jam crackers wrapped in parchment paper, feeling free and fused with the land itself. When she was moved to England, she said, something in her tore. Decades later, she returned to visit that old neighbor and realized what she had missed was not only the place, but the wholeness she had once felt there.

That is hiraeth. Not just missing a landscape, but missing the self you were within it. It is the soul’s version of phantom limb pain, a longing that cannot be satisfied because what is lost no longer exists in time.

The Psychology of Longing

Psychologists might call it existential ache, the awareness that something vital will always be just out of reach. At a philosophy festival in Belfast, Emily and I heard the organizer of the festival, Peter Rollins, argue that lack is part of being human, that we are built with a gap inside. We spend our lives trying to fill it, not realizing that the emptiness is what makes us who we are.

In that sense, hiraeth is not a flaw but a mirror. It reflects our yearning for connection, for innocence, for meaning that cannot quite be captured. It reminds us that being human means living in the space between what was and what could be.

There is a Zen poem that says, “When in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.” Even when we reach the place we yearn for, part of us still longs. That longing is not failure. It is life continuing to move through us.

Why We Need the Word

English has no true equivalent for hiraeth. Without such words, we are left to describe the vast terrain of feeling with a handful of blunt tools. Hiraeth gives shape to what has always been there. It names the bittersweet truth that longing itself can be beautiful.

When Dr. Rule told us that the Welsh farewell “hwyl fawr” literally means “big sail,” I thought about how the wind of hiraeth might fill it. The longing does not have to sink us. It can carry us forward, toward the places and people we love, even if we never quite arrive.