Sentimental vs. Nostalgia

Sentimentaladjective

Characterized by sentiment, sentimentality or excess emotion.

Nostalgianoun

A longing for home or familiar surroundings; homesickness.

Sentimentaladjective

Derived from emotion rather than reason; of or caused by sentiment.

Nostalgianoun

A bittersweet yearning for the things of the past.

Sentimentaladjective

Romantic.

Nostalgianoun

Reminiscence of the speaker's childhood or younger years.

Sentimentaladjective

Having, expressing, or containing a sentiment or sentiments; abounding with moral reflections; containing a moral reflection; didactic.

‘Nay, ev'n each moral sentimental stroke,Where not the character, but poet, spoke,He lopped, as foreign to his chaste design,Nor spared a useless, though a golden line.’;

Nostalgianoun

Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.

Sentimentaladjective

Inclined to sentiment; having an excess of sentiment or sensibility; indulging the sensibilities for their own sake; artificially or affectedly tender; - often in a reproachful sense.

‘A sentimental mind is rather prone to overwrought feeling and exaggerated tenderness.’;

Nostalgianoun

A sentimental yearning to return to an earlier time remembered as happier or more pleasant, or a former place evoking happy memories; a longing to experience again a former happy time; as, a nostalgia for the brotherhood of the Woodstock music festival; a nostalgia for the comradeship of one's college friends.

Sentimentaladjective

Addressed or pleasing to the emotions only, usually to the weaker and the unregulated emotions.

Nostalgianoun

longing for something past

Sentimentaladjective

given to or marked by sentiment or sentimentality

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning , a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning or , and was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.

‘homecoming’; ‘pain’; ‘ache’;

Sentimentaladjective

effusively or insincerely emotional;

‘a bathetic novel’; ‘maudlin expressons of sympathy’; ‘mushy effusiveness’; ‘a schmaltzy song’; ‘sentimental soap operas’; ‘slushy poetry’;