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Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae was an encyclopedic tracing of "first things" that remained uncritically in use in Europe until the sixteenth century. Plutarch employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds. 522 BC) employed creative etymologies to flatter his patrons. The word "etymology" derives from the Greek ἐτυμολογία (etumologia) < ἔτυμον (etumon), “‘true sense’” + -λογία (-logia), “‘study of’”, from λόγος ( logos), "speech, oration, discourse, word". In this way, word roots have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.Įven though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, nowadays much etymological research is effectuated in language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. Ennui may sound like a colleague of weltschmerz, but the 18th century word is much more aligned with listlessness, dissatisfaction and lack of excitement, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.Etymology is the study of the roots and history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Angst is a cousin of weltschmerz, but is more limited to describing personal anxiety, fear, or apprehension, rather than a broad sense of anguish at the state of the world. The phrase has endured because “no one has yet come up with a better way of expressing the pain and sorrow that it conveys,” Whaley says. There was another spike in mentions in the 1990s, coinciding with the economic realities (including a tax hike for everyone) of reuniting East and West Germany. In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Germany was often called “the sick man of Europe.”

All in all, it was a decade that introduced major health, security and environmental worries. The AIDS epidemic was starting to spread in the country, people feared acid rain, and they worried about the widespread death of the forests. In 1980, a right-wing extremist attack during Oktoberfest killed 12 and injured hundreds. The Berlin Wall would not fall until 1989, and East and West were facing off across the border dividing Germany. In German texts, there was a spike in mentions of weltschmerz in the 1980s. Whaley points to “the 1968 student protests, the Baader-Meinhof terrorist attacks and the economic problems of the early 1970s,” which, he says, triggered anxiety and frustration that “were in some ways comparable” to the post-war despair. According to Google Books’ Ngram viewer, which charts the usage of words and phrases in books over time, weltschmerz’s usage in English texts spiked after two world wars, and then again in the 1970s.

It’s a phrase that has stood the test of time. As Wilhelm Alfred Braun wrote in Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry: “It is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”Īs explained by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the expression sought to define “the prevailing mood of melancholy and pessimism associated with the poets of the Romantic era that arose from their refusal or inability to adjust to those realities of the world that they saw as destructive of their right to subjectivity and personal freedom-a phenomenon thought to typify Romanticism.”įor 19th-century German writers, weltschmerz was an abnormal sensitivity to the evils and ills of the world and the misery of existence. “ Weltschmerz is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally,” says Joachim Whaley, a professor of German history and thought at the University of Cambridge. It was first coined by German writer Jean Paul, who used it to describe Lord Byron’s discontent in the novel Selina, and it signifies a sadness about life.