Say it first, because it doesn’t sound the way it looks to an English eye: roughly hir-eyeth — the first syllable short, not hire — the last landing like the end of breath. Ask a dictionary and it will tell you hiraeth means longing and, well, period; but longing is the word English reaches for when it hasn’t got the right one, an all-purpose ache and want applied to a lover, a holiday, a sandwich, with equal ease. Hiraeth is a specialist’s tool. It names one exact thing: that you love a place, that you need to be in it as something close to visceral, and — the part English keeps mislaying — that you know, even as you feel all of it, you cannot go back. The three don’t arrive in sequence. They arrive fused, which is why one word can carry what an English sentence has to lay out end to end. Homesickness is too curable. Nostalgia is too sweet. Hiraeth writes the impossibility into the definition: the door is shut, the longing is for the room on the other side of it, and part of what you feel is the shut door.
But here is the fun in hiraeth — it’s that the place you feel it for need not have existed. You can feel hiraeth for a home that was never yours, a time that ended before you arrived, a version of somewhere, someplace, someone that your memory has quietly improved past the point of fact — it will attach to a country you left, or to one you only ever heard described, warmly and at length, by someone who left it before you were born. And it refuses to stay put on a map. The object can be a place, yes, but as easily a time, or one particular hour of one particular day; a person no longer reachable, whether by distance or death or the plain fact that neither of you is who you were; or a thing so small it embarrasses you to grieve it. The word does not rank them. It only insists the ache is the same ache, whatever it has fastened onto.
The word has been having a moment lately, and not an entirely good one — it turns up on the tote bag and in the caption now, filed under beautiful untranslatable words, stripped down to a soft, sellable wistfulness, a cozy sort of missing you might feel for a cottage weekend. That is a small theft, because the real word is not cozy: it is a word about not being able to go home, and the raw need, pain, want, and love that the feeling generates. Blurring that into a mood is reductionist and that, in the end, defeats the whole reason the word exists.
It exists because a feeling you can name is one you can hold a little away from yourself and up to the light — a good deal more bearable than carrying it shapeless. Everyone has a hiraeth. The Welsh only did the rest of us the courtesy of giving it a shape. Now you have the word for it.