The derivation
νόστος is the homecoming — the word that names the whole plot of the Odyssey and titled the lost epic of the Achaeans' returns, the Nostoi. It is a derivative noun, built on the verb νέομαι "to return home," and the two surviving authorities (Beekes treats the word only in a cross-reference stub, "νόστος = νέομαι"; his νέομαι article is missing from our source parse) agree on a finding that reaches well past travel. The root does not mean merely to go back. It means to come through alive.
Frisk states it precisely. νέομαι must stand for an earlier *νέστ-ομαι — the buried -s- is proven by the -σ- of νόστος — and that form "deckt sich formal genau mit germ.," matches the Germanic forms exactly: Gothic ga-nisan "to be healed, to be saved" (modern German genesen, "to convalesce"), Old English ge-nesan "to escape, be saved, survive"; the semantic fit "leuchtet… unmittelbar ein," is immediately evident (Frisk, GEW s.v. νέομαι). The same root carries the causative in Gothic nasjan "to save" and Old High German nerian "to save, heal, nourish" (nähren). Chantraine reaches the identical conclusion through Ruijgh: "Le sens originel de la racine est la notion de retour heureux, de salut" — the root's original sense is happy return, salvation — and in the active it would mean simply "sauver," to save (Chantraine, DELG s.v. νέομαι). He adds Sanskrit násate "to approach, unite" and the divine name Nāsatyā, dual title of the Aśvins, which "signifierait «les deux sauveurs»" — the two saviors.
So the homecoming-word and the recovery-word are the same word. To reach home, in the deep grammar of the root, is to be delivered — and the name Νέστωρ, "he who brings [his men] home safely," is, in the Nachträge's gloss, literally "Heimführer, Retter": home-leader, savior (Frisk, GEW Nachträge s.v. νέομαι). One curious branch confirms the logic from the side of plenty: νόστος also means "yield, produce" (the return on grain), and νόστιμος runs from "concerning the return" to "nourishing, fruitful" — homecoming as the thing that feeds.
Root
- *nes- (Greek *νέσ-ομαι) "to return safely, to be saved" — Chantraine and Frisk (Beekes absent from the parse). The medial *-s- is guaranteed by νόστος (< *νέστ-ος). Original sense, per Ruijgh: "retour heureux, de salut"; active "to save."
- Germanic cognates: Gothic ga-nisan "be healed, saved" (Ger. genesen), OE ge-nesan "survive"; causative Gothic nasjan / OHG nerian "to save, heal, nourish." Indo-Iranian: Skt. násate "approach, unite"; the divine Nāsatyā (the Aśvins) "the two saviors." Chantraine rejects a link with ναίω "to dwell." Pokorny 766f.
In the corpus
104 occurrences in the corpus — and they cluster, as one would expect, around the poem of return. νόστος is the thing Odysseus wants and the gods withhold; its adjective fixes the most loaded phrase in the epic, νόστιμον ἦμαρ, "the day of homecoming," the future the hero is forever sailing toward. The dictionaries record the word's second life as a commercial and agricultural term — νόστος as "income, yield," ἄνοστος "yielding nothing," νόστιμος "fruitful, nourishing" — so that the same noun names both the return of the man and the return on the harvest. From the verb come νοστέω "to come home safe" and the proper name Νέστωρ; the whole family turns on arriving intact.
The word's world
νόστος is homecoming as the recovery of the self. Gregory Nagy made the term central to the study of archaic epic, reading the hero's return as a structural counterweight to κλέος, the glory that travels in song (Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans). And Ruth Padel shows what the Odyssey makes of the word's loss: the lotus, Circe, and the Sirens "took away their nostimon émar, 'day of return'" — and with it "thought of, desire for, home," disorienting the companions' very "sense of self" (Padel, Whom Gods Destroy). To lose the νόστος is to forget who and where you are; the threats to homecoming are threats to identity. The etymology had said as much from the start: a root in which coming home and being saved are one word makes the homecoming not a journey's end but a deliverance — the return of a man to himself, alive.
Authorities: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque s.v. νέομαι (scan pp. 761–762, #5594; νόστος recorded as its derivative); Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch s.v. νέομαι (scan pp. 1276–1278, #4067; Nachträge p. 2282, #7695 — Νέστωρ "Heimführer, Retter"). Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill 2010): treats νόστος s.v. νέομαι (cross-reference stub at #4365, scan p. 1075), but the νέομαι article is absent from the source parse and is not quoted. Root *nes- "return safely / be saved" and the Germanic/Indo-Iranian cognates per Chantraine (after Ruijgh) / Frisk; Pokorny 766f. Interpretive sources retrieved from the Oracle library (Classical Philology & Ancient Thought): Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (1979); Padel, Whom Gods Destroy (1995). Scholarly anchors named by the dictionaries: Ruijgh; Mayrhofer, EWAia 2.146, 156; Mühlestein, Mus. Helv. 22 (1965). Corpus figures: Logoi corpus, live. Receipt: soul-word-journey-v0.