Spill a Word: Saudade

For the love of languages… Spill a word !

Origin: Portuguese

A constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that’s missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone.

This can take different aspects, from concrete realities (a loved one, a friend, the motherland, the homeland…) to the mysterious and transcendent.

Saudade is similar but not equal to nostalgia.

In the book In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G. Bell writes:

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.

Source: Saudade