A word from Portuguese
What does saudade mean?
Say it sow-DAH-jee · or sow-DAHD
A deep, tender longing for someone or something you love that is gone, and may never come back.
The meaning of saudade
Saudade is missing something so much that the missing becomes part of you. It is the ache for a person who has died, a love that ended, a home you left, a version of your life that never happened. It is the ache for what was, and what never quite was.
What makes saudade different from sadness is that the love is still in it. You would not feel saudade for something that did not matter. The longing is proof of how much it meant, and so it hurts and comforts at the same time.
That is why people often call it untranslatable. English splits it into longing, yearning, nostalgia, homesickness and grief. Portuguese keeps it in one word.
How to pronounce saudade
- Brazil
- sow-DAH-jee. The first syllable rhymes with cow.
- Portugal
- sow-DAHD. The last syllable is almost swallowed.
Both are right. Use the one that belongs to the person you learned it from.
Saudades: how Portuguese says “I miss you”
Saudades is the plural, and it is how people say they miss each other. In Portugal, tenho saudades tuas: I have saudades of you. In Brazil, estou com saudades de você: I am with saudades of you. You do not simply miss someone. You carry the missing with you.
Where the word comes from
Saudade grew out of the Latin solitas, solitude, by way of the old Galician-Portuguese spoken on the Atlantic coast. Being alone and missing someone slowly became one word. It belongs to a coast of sailors and emigrants, to the people who waited for ships and to the ones on them, and it runs through Portuguese poetry and song, especially fado.
Words like saudade in other languages
- Hiraeth (Welsh): longing for a home you cannot return to, or that never was.
- Sehnsucht (German): an intense yearning for something far off and hard to name.
- Nostalgia (from Greek): the pain of wanting to go home.
- Longing (English): the nearest single word, without the tenderness.
“Our hearts are incommunicable still. In what we show ourselves we are ignored.”
Pessoa, Portugal’s great poet of longing, writing in English.
We named the app after the word. Saudade gives you one line of poetry or literature a day, chosen by a person, from writers who felt it first. Then a private page to write what it brings up. Over the weeks, your pages become a book of your own.
Get Saudade on the App Store