Word.ws English Dictionary

anemoia

/ˌænəˈmɔɪə/

anemoia noun: nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.

Noun

anemoia (uncountable)

  1. (neologism, uncommon) Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
    • Yet, from reboots to genre revivals, nostalgia remains a powerful force in pop culture. So does an associated phenomenon, called anemoia, which is essentially nostalgia for a past you’ve never experienced. Nostalgia and anemoia have been Broadway’s bread and butter for decades.2015 November 15, Robert Trussell, “Awash in nostalgia”, in The Kansas City Star, volume 136, number 59, Kansas City, Mo., page 12D
    • Goetzman (who also records his own own^([sic]) original music under the alias Raspberries and Rum) brought up another idea as a possible explanation for his Toto-based virality: anemoia. That’s the concept of a person feeling nostalgic for something they never experienced.[…]What I can say is this...2018 May 17, Shane Nyman, “Local guy’s ‘Africa’ remix perfects nostalgia”, in The Post-Crescent, volume 99, number 118, Appleton, Wis., page 6A
    Synonyms:
    fauxstalgia

Examples of anemoia in a sentence

  • Goetzman (who also records his own own^([sic]) original music under the alias Raspberries and Rum) brought up another idea as a possible explanation for his Toto-based virality: anemoia.2018 May 17, Shane Nyman, “Local guy’s ‘Africa’ remix perfects nostalgia”, in The Post-Crescent, volume 99, number 118, Appleton, Wis....
  • A White Christmas is the perfect example of anemoia, nostalgia for a time we never knew.2018, Trevor Harley, The Psychology of Weather, Routledge, →ISBN, page 102:
  • The theme of that YouTube chat was the idea of anemoia, a niche form of nostalgia that prompts a yearning for a historical time and place that you have never actually experienced.2024 January 14, Tim Adams, “The big picture: layers of nostalgia on London’s Oxford Street”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Synonyms of anemoia

Origin of anemoia

Coined by American author and neologist John Koenig in 2012, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that currently lack words. From Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, “wind”) + -oia, extracted from loanwords like paranoia where -νοια (-noia) refers to a certain state of mind.

Words that rhyme with anemoia

Questions about anemoia

What does anemoia mean?
Anemoia means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
How do you use anemoia in a sentence?
Goetzman (who also records his own own^([sic]) original music under the alias Raspberries and Rum) brought up another idea as a possible explanation for his Toto-based virality: anemoia.
What part of speech is anemoia?
Anemoia is a noun.
How do you pronounce anemoia?
Anemoia is pronounced /ˌænəˈmɔɪə/.

Words near anemoia in the dictionary

  1. anemographic
  2. anemographically
  3. anemographs
  4. anemography
  5. Anemoi
  6. anemoia
  7. anemologic
  8. anemological
  9. anemology
  10. anemometer
  11. anemometers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: anemoia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-anemoia.wav.

Cite this entry: “anemoia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/anemoia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.