Homesickness — a deep longing for one's distant home or homeland, or for a loved one there..
Homesickness — a deep longing for one's distant home or homeland, or for a loved one there.
Homesickness proper — the ache of being away and wanting to return — and the literal antonym of Fernweh (the inverse ache, to be far away). It differs from modern nostalgia, which yearns for the past, where Heimweh is anchored to a place one wishes to return to — though historically the two were the same concept (it is the source of the word “nostalgia”). Broader Sehnsucht need not be directed at home.
Heim “home” + Weh “woe, ache” = “home-ache.”
Heim (“home”) + Weh (“woe, ache,” cognate with English woe). Originally a medical technical term in Switzerland.
Heimweh is the direct source of the medical term nostalgia, coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer as a Greek rendering of Heimweh (nostos “homecoming” + algos “pain”) to describe a disease afflicting Swiss soldiers abroad. The transferred sense of nostalgia as “yearning for the past” dates only to about 1920; Heimweh itself kept its spatial “homesickness” meaning.