HOMECOMING PAIN

Nostalgia today is associated with warm memories and happy recollections, but it used to have a much harsher meaning. When the word was first brought into 1770, it described an intense ache to return home. The etymology of nostalgia (which was first coined by a Swiss student in 1688) reflects that earlier definition. Nost-, the initial part of the word, comes from Ancient Greek nostos, meaning "homecoming", and -algia is from Greek algos, "pain". Nostos comes from a Proto-Indo-European word, nes, with the same denotation; -tos is just an adjectival suffix here. Algos, meanwhile, developed from the verb algein, which meant "to feel pain" and has an uncertain etymology. Usage of the word nostalgia​ rapidly took off in the twentieth century and peaked in the 1990s.