Coddiwomple (v.)
Origin: English slang
Definition: To travel purposefully towards an unknown destination.
Coddiwomple is when you have a vague idea of your destination but not a care for how long it takes to arrive. Such as if you go hiking, you know you’ll eventually reach the summit, but every part of the trail along the way is just as beautiful.
Resfeber (n.)
Origin: Swedish
Definition: The meaning of resfeber refers to the restless race of the traveler’s heart before the journey begins. When anxiety and anticipation are tangled together.
It’s that moment just after you buy your plane tickets and excitement and fear flood in all at once, creating a mixture of emotions that make you feel anxious or physically ill.
Solivagant (adj.)
Origin: Latin
Definition: Wandering alone. A solitary adventurer who travels or wanders the globe.
Not all those who wander are lost, but all those who wander alone are solivagants. From the Latin word solivagus, meaning lonely or solitary, solivagant describes anyone who enjoys meandering around new countries alone, to take it all in.
Fernweh (n.)
Origin: German
Definition: An ache to get away and travel to a distant place, a feeling even stronger than wanderlust. It is a German word that translates to “distance-sickness.”
While someone with wanderlust might sit at home and happily fantasize about all the places they might visit, someone with fernweh would feel a deeper sense of longing, a sort of homesickness, but for foreign lands.
Dérive (n)
Origin: French
Definition: A spontaneous and unplanned journey where the traveler leaves their life behind and allows themselves to be guided by the landscape and architecture.
Literally translated as “drift,” dérive is the idea that even if you drift, you will end up on the right path. When you’re wandering through a new city and you just happen to wander on a path that takes you to great discoveries.
Vagary (v.)
Origin: Latin
Definition: A whimsical or roaming journey.
Vagary is the true definition of free styling. From Latin, vagārī meaning “to roam”, it symbolizes taking an unpredictable pathway without knowing the destination and not caring.
Onism (n.)
Origin: Danish
Definition: Onism describes understanding that we’ll never get to see it all. It’s the frustration of being stuck in just one body that can only inhabit one place at a time.
Like the Swedish word ‘resfeber,’ onism describes the feeling of knowing that you’ll never be able to see all the amazing places in the world that there are to see.
Yoko meshi (n.)
Origin: Japanese
Definition: This untranslatable gem describes the stress of speaking a foreign language.
The Japanese word ‘meshi’ literally means ‘boiled rice’ and ‘yoko’ means ‘horizontal,’ together it means ‘a meal eaten sideways.’ The Japanese have created a beautiful way of describing the unique kind of stress you might experience when speaking a foreign language.
Selcouth (adj.)
Origin: Old English
Definition: When everything you see and experience is unfamiliar and strange, yet you find it marvelous anyway.
It’s that feeling you get when you travel to a foreign land and food, culture, customs, or language is strange and different from everything you’ve experienced before, yet you love every minute of it.
