Word.ws English Dictionary

topophilia

/ˌtɒpəˈfɪliə/

topophilia noun: a strong sense of place, often combined with a sense of cultural identity.

Noun

topophilia (uncountable)

  1. A strong sense of place, often combined with a sense of cultural identity.
    • What I feel towards my grandmother's house could be described as topophilia.
    • Topophilia might not be associated with your childhood home, however. For me, all synesthetic tendencies take me not to Seattle but to Barcelona, the city where I lived in my 20s, where I got married, and the only place I have returned to year after year (except for 2020, due to the pandemic).2021 January 14, Arthur C. Brooks, “Find the Place You Love. Then Move There.”, in The Atlantic

Origin of topophilia

From Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place”) + -philia. Coined by British-American poet W. H. Auden in 1947, used by French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1958), and made popular by Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his essay and book Topophilia (1961 and 1974).

Questions about topophilia

What does topophilia mean?
Topophilia means a strong sense of place, often combined with a sense of cultural identity.
What part of speech is topophilia?
Topophilia is a noun.
How do you pronounce topophilia?
Topophilia is pronounced /ˌtɒpəˈfɪliə/.

Words near topophilia in the dictionary

  1. toponymous
  2. toponyms
  3. toponymy
  4. Topoozian
  5. Topoozians
  6. topophilia
  7. topophilic
  8. topophobia
  9. topophone
  10. topophones
  11. topophotomap

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: topophilia (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-topophilia.wav.

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