A weary, melancholy ache that settles in when one measures how the world actually is against how one wishes it were.
A weary, melancholy ache that settles in when one measures how the world actually is against how one wishes it were — a sentimental world-weariness.
A cosmic, philosophical sadness about the gap between the ideal and the real — distinct from personal grief or clinical depression. Differs from Sehnsucht (a longing toward an ideal) in being the disappointment that arises from the world's inadequacy. Broader than mere melancholy or ennui; overlaps with French mal du siècle.
Welt “world” + Schmerz “pain” = “world-pain.” (Schmerz is cognate with English “smart,” sharp pain.)
German: Welt + Schmerz, coined by the Romantic novelist Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter). Sources disagree on the date (Merriam-Webster/Wikipedia: his 1827 novel Selina; etymonline: 1810). Etymonline mislabels him an “art historian” — he was a novelist.
A product of late-18th/early-19th-c. Romanticism, popularized in German by Heinrich Heine. First English use dated 1864 (Merriam-Webster) or 1872 (etymonline). Still applied today to “21st-century weltschmerz” — sadness about the state of the world.