The condition and ache of estrangement.
The condition and ache of estrangement — being a foreigner or exile far from home, with the attendant alienation, loneliness, and longing for the familiar.
Specifically spatial and relational: alienation caused by displacement from homeland, not generalized loneliness or desolation. Unlike saudade (a bittersweet longing for an absent person or time), ghurba centers on the lived predicament of the stranger-in-a-strange-land; unlike Korean han (collective accumulated grief), it is the migrant's or exile's personal estrangement (the exiled person is a mughtarib).
“estrangement, being-a-stranger, exile,” from the root gh-r-b (“to go away; be strange; the west”).
From the Arabic root غ-ر-ب (gh-r-b) “to go away / be strange / the west,” linking “stranger” (gharīb) and “west/sunset” (gharb) — where the sun departs.
Deep roots in classical Arabic poetry; took on renewed force with 20th–21st-century Arab migration and displacement, and recurs in Gulf music and scholarship.
Definition is solid and widely attested. Don't conflate ghurba (the emotional/existential state) with the distinct Islamic theological term ghurabāʼ (“the strangers”). (One popular source misprints the root with qāf; the correct radical is ghayn.)