saudade (English)

Where does "saudade" come from?

The English 'saudade' is a loan from Portuguese, where it names a wistful longing for someone or something absent or lost[1]. The Portuguese word is inherited from Old Galician-Portuguese 'soydade', which came from Late Latin 'solitātem', meaning 'solitude'[2][4]. That Latin root traces back to 'sōlitās', formed from 'sōl-' ('alone') plus the suffix '-tās'[3], and the older base is often linked to Latin 'solus' ('alone')[5]. The word was first recorded in Portuguese in the 16th century[2], and its sense narrowed from plain solitude toward the emotional melancholy of absence that English speakers borrowed.

Open questions

The Portuguese sound changes that turned 'soydade' into 'saudade' are irregular, and scholars suggest analogy with 'saudar' and 'saudade' ('salvation') or hypercorrection, though these explanations are not settled. [2]
The deeper origin of Latin 'solus' is disputed, with proposals linking it to a reflexive Proto-Indo-European stem or to a root meaning 'whole, healthy', and the Proto-Indo-European forms are reconstructed. [5] [6]
A proposed influence from Arabic 'sawdāʔ' ('melancholy') on the Portuguese word has been theorized but is not confirmed. [2]

Full etymology tree

saudade (English), 'A feeling of melancholy for something that is absent or lost.'
- borrowed saudade (Portuguese), 'wistfulness, melancholy, nostalgia, yearning, longing; the feeling of missing something or someone'
  - inherited soydade (Old Galician-Portuguese), 'the feeling of missing something or someone'
    - inherited sōlitātem (Latin)
      - derived solitas (Latin), 'loneliness, solitude'
        compound sōl- (Latin)
        suffix -tas (Latin), '-ty, -dom, -hood, -ness, -ship; Used to form feminine abstract nouns indicating a state of being.'

Ancestors

saudade (Portuguese)

Sources

Updated October 2026

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Etymology data from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · About Miraris