living somewhere as an outsider: the place a person stays without owning it, or the stretch of life spent that way
This word is built from the verb for living somewhere as an outsider, and it carries everything that verb implies. Such a person has a roof and work, but no title to the ground under him and no standing among the people around him. The noun can point either at the place where that life is lived or at the life itself, and Hebrew is content to let one word cover both.
Most of the time it sits inside a single phrase: "the land of your sojournings." That is the wording God uses when he promises Canaan to Abraham, and it echoes down through Isaac's line to Jacob's sons. The tension in it is the whole point. In one breath God calls the country the place where the family are outsiders and promises it to them as a permanent holding, so the phrase carries both their present homelessness and their future inheritance. Ezekiel later turns the same phrase on the exile, calling the foreign countries where Israel is scattered the land of their sojourning.
Two passages stretch the word past land and family history. Jacob sums up his entire hundred and thirty years to Pharaoh as one long stay in country that was never his. A psalmist sings God's laws "in the house of my sojourning," a line readers have taken either as a literal home abroad or as a picture of a whole life spent passing through.
In a couple of poetic lines the outsider edge fades and the word means little more than the spot where someone happens to live. Even there it suggests a lodging rather than a holding, which is what separates it from the ordinary Hebrew word for a settlement (מוֹשָׁב) and from the word for the place where someone takes up residence (מִשְׁכָּן).