Word list · 16 words
Words for love and longing
English has love, longing and missing someone, and then runs short. These words fill the gaps: the involuntary obsession of new love, the rush of a romantic thrill, the ache for someone you cannot have, and the homesickness for a place or person that is gone.
Several are loanwords whose full sense is wider than any one-line translation, so each entry gives the everyday meaning first and then what a translation loses. A few are psychology terms; those pages describe common patterns, not diagnoses.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Love
Love behaves less like an emotion than like a drive — closer to hunger or thirst than to sadness, and in some people it is still firing after twenty years.
Head Words
Limerence
Limerence is an involuntary state of intense romantic obsession, in which your mind fixes on one person and aches for a sign that they feel the same.
Psychology & Relationship Dynamics
Kilig
Kilig is the physical rush — shivers, weak knees, butterflies — that a romantic thrill sets off in the body.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
La Douleur Exquise
In English, la douleur exquise means the ache of wanting someone unattainable.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Jeong
Jeong is the slow-forming attachment that builds between people — and to places and objects — simply from proximity and time, often without either party choosing it.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Ya'aburnee
Ya'aburnee is a spoken wish to die first, said to someone you cannot imagine outliving — literally, 'you bury me'.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Mamihlapinatapai
Mamihlapinatapai is a Yaghan word famous in English for a wordless look between two people who each want the other to act — a definition the linguistic evidence supports far more weakly than the…
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Retrouvailles
Retrouvailles is the reunion of people who have been apart — the event and its joy folded into one word.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Saudade
Saudade is a Portuguese word for the bittersweet ache of missing someone or something absent — a longing so warm it is almost a form of love.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Hiraeth
Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a deep, grief-tinged longing for a home, a time, or Wales itself — a home that may be lost, idealised, or that never quite existed.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Sehnsucht
Sehnsucht is a German word for an intense, bittersweet yearning for an ideal or unattainable state — a longing for something you can't quite name, and could never fully grasp even if you could.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Toska
Toska is a heavy ache of the soul, running anywhere on a scale from spiritual anguish to plain boredom.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Nostalgia
Nostalgia is the warm, wistful longing for the past — a bittersweet fondness for earlier times, places, or people, usually remembered a little rosier than they really were.
Head Words
Natsukashii
Natsukashii is the warm rush you get when something from your past turns up in front of you right now — usually exclaimed at the trigger, rather than a mood you sink into.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Anemoia
Anemoia is nostalgia for a time you've never known — the strange ache of missing an era you never actually lived through, glimpsed only in photographs, films, or old music.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings
Fernweh
Fernweh is a German word for an aching longing to be far away — a homesickness for places you've never been.
Untranslatable & Rare Feelings