Word.ws English Dictionary

hygge

/ˈhʊɡə/

hygge noun: a feeling of cosiness, comfort, contentment and conviviality.

Noun

hygge (uncountable)

  1. (UK) A feeling of cosiness, comfort, contentment and conviviality.
    • According to this now vast popular literature, the creation of an atmosphere of hygge is aided by gløgg (mulled wine), meatballs and cardamom buns.2016 November 22, Charlotte Higgins, “The hygge conspiracy”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 30 Apr 2018

Adjective

hygge (comparative more hygge, superlative most hygge)

  1. (UK) Cosy, convivial.
    • ‘So, where are they all? What's everyone doing?’
      ‘They're getting hygge,’ she tells me, making a noise that sounds a little like she has something stuck in her throat.2015, Helen Russell, The Year of Living Danishly, Icon Books Ltd, →ISBN
    • [Emma Jane] Unsworth describes how “late at night, after video calls with the East Coast of America, she often stayed on as a host, alone, in those abandoned Zoom rooms, her own face staring back at her, the glow of the ring-light as hygge as any wood-burning stove, sipping a glass of something...2025 May 12, Shahidha Bari, quoting Emma Jane Unsworth, “Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth review – a riotous roadtrip”, in The Guardian, →ISSN, archived from the original on 25 Jul 2025

Forms of hygge

comparativemore hygge
superlativemost hygge

Origin of hygge

Borrowed from Danish hygge, Norwegian Nynorsk hygge or Norwegian Bokmål hygge.

Questions about hygge

What does hygge mean?
Hygge means a feeling of cosiness, comfort, contentment and conviviality.
What part of speech is hygge?
Hygge can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce hygge?
Hygge is pronounced /ˈhʊɡə/ (UK).

Words near hygge in the dictionary

  1. hygenic
  2. hygenicist
  3. hygenicists
  4. hygenist
  5. hygeology
  6. hygge
  7. hyght
  8. hygiastics
  9. Hygiea
  10. Hygiean
  11. Hygieia

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hygge (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)-Vealhurl-hygge.wav.

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