It's a poetic way of referring to the past. It evokes a sense of nostalgia. It's a word most people understand, but don't normally use. "Adown the lanes of memory bloom all the flowers of yesteryear"--Edgar Guest (a sentimental poet. In fact, a sentimental poet of yesteryear!) "These were some of the old-fashioned ways the boys and girls of yesteryear passed a happy evening." Googling for examples I found MANY references to variations on the phrase "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" ("Where are the clothes of yesteryear?" "Where are the wits of yesteryear?") I learn from Wikipedia that this is a famous line from a poem by François Villon, "Ballade des dames du temps jadis." The line is "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" and "This was translated into English by [Dante Gabrielle] Rossetti as 'Where are the snows of yesteryear?' for which he coined the new word yester-year to translate Villon's antan. The French word was used in its original sense of 'last yea', although both antan and the English yesteryear have now taken on a wider meaning of 'years gone by'".

'Yesteryear' is a rather poetic, romantic-sounding word to refer to the past and 'times gone by'. It's the equivalent of the French terms 'jadis' or 'd'antan', and like those words, is too pretentious a term to be used in everyday speech. Ou sont les neiges d'antan? = Where are the snows of yesteryear? And if you are interested in linguistic trivia, I believe that the word 'yesteryear' was actually invented to aid the translation of that French phrase.

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Gone without a trace. Sad. You saw it in a BBC article. Well, here is how BBC Radio 2 describes a nostalgic programme: "Pick of the Pops Tony Blackburn leads you down memory lane as he delves into the charts of yesteryear and plays the Pick of the Pops." These are the vocabulary of nostalgia: - go down memory lane - songs/hits/dances/clothes/memories of yesteryear

from a bygone era

Hi Simon, it's best to write the sentence, since context is everything... but I think yesteryear means, sometime in the past.