Wanderlust

What it means

It is midnight on a Sunday. A browser tab shows flights to Porto for 39 dollars, and you keep refreshing it with a full week of meetings ahead. You do not need Porto. You need to be moving: a station, a trail, a bus out of town. Wanderlust is that appetite for going, strong enough to feel in the legs.

The word is German, but it now lives mainly in English. Merriam-Webster lists it as an ordinary English noun, “strong longing for or impulse toward wandering”, and Wiktionary adds a slang sense, a roving eye in a relationship. American speakers say WAHN-der-lust and write it lower-case. Duden gives the German pronunciation, with a v sound and a short oo, and the gender die.

In German it is a minor word. Duden defines it as pleasure or joy in hiking, and rates it one bar out of five for frequency. DWDS marks it rare. For the urge to see distant countries, Germans more often say Fernweh, which Duden rates a step more common.

Where it comes from

The compound joins wandern, to hike or roam, and Lust, desire or pleasure. Wandern in German is closer to walking in the hills than to drifting, so the original Wanderlust is a hiker’s itch. The oldest of the DWDS examples, from a 1955 text, uses it for the youthful restlessness that kept a man from staying anywhere more than a few years.

English took the word in the late 19th century, and dictionaries disagree on the date. Merriam-Webster gives 1875 as the first known use; Etymonline gives 1902. Wiktionary’s earliest English quotation is from 1908. No coiner is recorded.

How to use it

Her wanderlust got her through four countries and three jobs before she turned thirty. Casual English, where the word is fully naturalised and needs no italics.

Im Frühling packt mich die Wanderlust, und ich laufe jedes Wochenende durch den Taunus. (In spring the urge to hike grabs me, and I walk the Taunus every weekend.) Everyday German, in the narrower sense of hiking rather than travel.

What it is not

Fernweh. Fernweh is an ache about distance itself. Duden defines it as longing for distance and faraway countries, and the Weh in it means pain. Wanderlust is an appetite rather than an ache, and it can be fed by a long walk outside town. A person with Fernweh may sit at home looking at an atlas. A person with wanderlust is already lacing their boots.

In the wild

• Björk, “Wanderlust”, on Volta, One Little Indian, 2007: she called the song the heart of the album and described it as looking for something while almost knowing you will never find it.
• Wanderlust, directed by David Wain, 2012: Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston leave New York for a commune in Georgia after their finances collapse.
• Konrad Lorenz, Das Jahr der Graugans, 1979, quoted in DWDS: young geese seized by Wanderlust days after hatching.