yesteryear

/ˌjɛstərˈjɪər/

Other forms: yesteryears

Yesteryear is an extremely poetic way to refer to the past. You might nostalgically talk about the town where you used to live as your home of yesteryear.

The word yesteryear was actually invented by a poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1870. Rossetti was searching for an accurate way to translate a phrase by the French poet Francois Villon — the line he came up with was "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" Other translators have substituted yore for yesteryear, but the latter is a word that perfectly captures a kind of nostalgia for a lost past.

Definitions of yesteryear

1. noun

   the time that has elapsed
   synonyms: past, past times

   types:

   yore

   time long past

   bygone, water under the bridge

   past events to be put aside

   old

   past times (especially in the phrase `in days of old')

   history

   the aggregate of past events

   time immemorial, time out of mind

   the distant past beyond memory

   auld langsyne, good old days, langsyne, old times

   past times remembered with nostalgia

   yesterday

   the recent past

   type of:

   time

   the continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past