The AI-powered English dictionary
countable and uncountable, plural nostalgias
(now uncommon) A longing for home or familiar surroundings; homesickness. quotations examples
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter L, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […]
(transferred sense) A bittersweet yearning for the things of the past. quotations examples
I can't have been the only person, last week, to feel a rush of nostalgia upon learning that Thames Water had removed a bus-sized, 15-tonne lump of food fat ("mixed with wet wipes") from the sewers under London. The fatberg was an August news story redolent of the old-fashioned silly season.
2013 August 16, Oliver Burkeman, “This is the cutest article”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 10, page 20
Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of your past, these nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade.
2022 November 15, Dan Hancox, “‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today”, in The Guardian