Word.ws English Dictionary

hiraeth

hiraeth noun: a feeling of homesickness, longing or yearning for something comfortable or familiar, especially in a Welsh context.

Noun

hiraeth (uncountable)

  1. (rare) A feeling of homesickness, longing or yearning for something comfortable or familiar, especially in a Welsh context.
    • So this hiraeth is good in some sense , although you feel the evil of it perhaps the moment that I am writing this.1927, Richard Humphyreys, The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, volume 26, Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (London, England), page 116
    • Biblical hiraeth - the longing for an idealized biblical home that may have never existed - intersects with authenticity and the hyperreality of the theme park.2020, Paul Thomas, Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and Museum of the Bible, Bloomsbury Publishing

Origin of hiraeth

Borrowed from Welsh hiraeth (“longing, nostalgia”).

Questions about hiraeth

What does hiraeth mean?
Hiraeth means a feeling of homesickness, longing or yearning for something comfortable or familiar, especially in a Welsh context.
What part of speech is hiraeth?
Hiraeth is a noun.

Words near hiraeth in the dictionary

  1. hirabol myrrh
  2. Hirachandra
  3. Hirado
  4. Hirado ware
  5. Hirado wares
  6. hiraeth
  7. hiragana
  8. hiraganas
  9. hirage
  10. Hirai
  11. Hirais

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hiraeth (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.

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