An intense, often painful longing or yearning.
An intense, often painful longing or yearning — typically for something ideal, unfinished, or unattainable.
More abstract and bittersweet than plain longing. Where Fernweh is longing for distant places and Heimweh is longing for home, Sehnsucht is a generalized, often object-less yearning for an ideal. Closely compared to Portuguese saudade.
sehnen “to long, yearn” + Sucht “craving; (archaically) sickness.” Sucht here traces to siech “sick,” not suchen “to seek” — so the older sense is closer to “yearning-sickness.”
German: sehnen + Sucht, the latter tied historically to siech (“sick”) / Siechtum rather than to suchen.
In Middle High German the “sickness” sense was prominent; the word later shed the illness reference to mean intense longing. It became a central Romantic concept (Goethe, Schiller) and was adopted by C. S. Lewis for his idea of “Joy.” English adoption is reported (OED) from the 1840s — unverified directly.