There are some feelings so specific that English doesn’t bother to name them. The tug you feel when you leave a place that once felt like home. The strange comfort in sadness. The longing that is both wound and sweetness. We usually settle for calling it nostalgia, but that is not quite right. Nostalgia is sentimental. This feeling has more gravity.

I didn’t know the word for it until recently, when my co-host Emily John Garcés and I explored it on our podcast Fifty Words for Snow, a linguistic expedition into brave new words. Each week we search for words from other languages that capture something English has overlooked. This time, our word was hiraeth.

Our guest was Dr. Steven Rule, known online as Doctor........

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