60 Beautiful Travel Words Every Travel Lover Should Know (2024)

Are you dying to perambulate? Dreaming of the day when you can coddiwomple around? Wondering what the heck those things even mean? If the latter rings true, well, we’ve got some travel words you need to add to your vocab ASAP. Because, let’s be honest, being a lover of travel is almost a language unto itself already. If you’ve got roam in your bones and run across someone else in the world who does too, you just sort of get each other. And so hearing words that capture the inherent magic of being a traveler is bound to stir something inside of you. Or, at the very least, stir you into planning your next trip.

As an added bonus, the following lexicon can serve a few other excellent purposes for the wandering soul — like making for a great tattoo, or helping you beast all of your friends in Scrabble. So, keep reading, but be forewarned… you’re going to want to pack your bags and book a flight by the time you’re finished.

Other Words for Travel

1. Pilgrimage (n.): A journey; the course of life on earth.
2. Trek (n.): A trip or movement, especially when involving difficulties or complex organization; an arduous journey.
3. Voyage (n.): An act or instance of traveling; a course or period of traveling by other than land routes.
4. Gallivant (v.): To travel, roam, or move about for pleasure.
5. Perambulate (v.): To travel over or through, especially on foot.
6. Expedition (n.): A journey or excursion undertaken for a specific purpose.
7. Excursion (n.): A usually brief pleasure trip.
8. Odyssey (n.): A long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune.
9. Walkabout (n.): A short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work — often used in the phrase go walkabout; something (such as a journey) similar to a walkabout.
10. Migrate (v.): To move from one country, place, or locality to another.
11. Globe-trotting (adj.): Traveling widely.
12. Itinerant (adj.): Traveling from place to place.
13. Sojourn (v.): To stay as a temporary resident.
14. Traverse (v.): To go or travel across or over; to move or pass along or through.
15. Circumnavigate (v.): To go completely around, especially by water.
16. Peregrinate (v.): To travel, especially on foot; to walk or travel over.
17. Peripatetic (n.): Movement or journeys hither and thither.
18. Coddiwomple (v.): To travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination.
19. Dérive (n.): A spontaneous and unplanned journey where the traveler is guided by the landscape and architecture.
20. Hitoritabi (n.): Traveling alone; solitary journey.

Words for Travelers

1. Nemophilist (n.): One who is fond of forests or forest scenery; a haunter of the woods.
2. Gadabout (n.): A person who flits about in social activity.
3. Flâneur (n.): A person who strolls the city in order to experience it; deliberately aimless.
4. Nefelibata (n.): One who lives in the clouds of their own imagination or dreams, or one who does not obey conventions of society, literature, or art; “cloud walker.”
5. Hodophile (n.): One who loves to travel; a traveler with a special affinity for roads.
6. Wayfarer (n.): A traveler, especially on foot.
7. Livsnjutare (n.): One who loves life deeply and lives it to the extreme.
8. Thalassophile (n.): A lover of the sea; someone who loves the sea, ocean.
9. Musafir (n.): “Traveler” in Arabic, Persian, Hindu, and Urdu.
10. Nomad (n.): An individual who roams about.
11. Solivagent (adj.): Someone who wanders or travels the world alone; a solitary adventurer.
12. Luftmensch (n.): An impractical dreamer, literally an air person; someone with their head in the clouds.

Creative Travel Words

1. Sturmfrei (adj.): The freedom of being alone and being able to do what your heart desires.
2. Resfeber (n.): The restless race of a traveler’s heart before a journey begins; a ‘travel fever’ of anxiety and anticipation.
3. Hireath (n.): A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
4. Sonder (v.): The full definition, taken from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, is: “[Sonder is] the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
5. Fernweh (n.): An ache for a distant place; missing places you’ve never been before.
6. Sehnsucht (n.): A craving for adventure; an intense yearning for something far-off and indefinable.
7. Numinous (adj.): A powerful feeling of both fear and fascination, of being in awe and overwhelmed by what is before you.
8. Vagary (v.): An unpredictable instance; a wandering journey; a whimsical, wild, or unusual idea, desire, or action.
9. Saudade (n.): A nostalgic longing to be near again to something, someone, or some place that is distant, or which has been loved and then lost.
10. Trouvaille (n.): Something lovely discovered by chance; a windfall.
11. Yoko meshi (n.): The peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language.
12. Selcouth (adj.): Unfamiliar, rare, strange, and yet marvelous.
13. Yugen (n.): A profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe that triggers a deep emotional response.
14. Novaturient (adj.): A desire to seek powerful change in one’s life; the feeling that pushes you to travel.
15. Travitude (n.): When you start to feel grumpy and sassy because you miss traveling.
16. Eudaimonia (n.): The condition of human flourishing or of living well.
17. Ukiyo (n.): Living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life; “the floating world.”
18. Strikehedonia (n.): The joy of being able to say “to hell with it.”
19. Solivagant (n.): To wander alone. Someone who is a solo adventurer who travels the world. This word comes from the Latin word solivagus, which means lonely or solitary.
20. Eleutheromania (n.): A great or incredible desire for freedom. This is a person who has an intense longing for liberty and independence.
21. co*ckaigne (n.): A place of luxury or idleness. This word comes from the French word cocaigne, which means “the land of plenty.”
22. Ecophobia (n.): An abnormal fear of home surroundings.
23. Morii (n.): The desire to capture a fleeting moment.
24. Exulansis (n.): This is what you feel when you stop trying to explain or talk about an experience because the surrounding people cannot relate to it.
25. Rückkehrunruhe (n.): The feeling of returning home after a trip and finding that you keep forgetting you’ve been away. The person has to constantly remind themselves that the excursion even happened.
26. Absquatulate (n.): To flee or leave abruptly without saying goodbye.
27. Onism (n.): The awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. The frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time.
28. Hygge (n.): The cozy feeling of relaxing with friends while having a meal or drinks. A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a sense of contentment or well-being.

This article was originally published on Jan. 8, 2021