Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Marked by or exhibiting sorrow, grief, or pain.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Exciting or expressing sorrow, grief, or distress; dismal; mournful: as, a dolorous object; a dolorous region; dolorous sighs.
  • Painful; giving pain.
  • Synonyms See list under doleful.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Full of grief; sad; sorrowful; doleful; dismal
  • adjective Occasioning pain or grief; painful.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Solemnly or ponderously sad.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective showing sorrow

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French doloros, from Late Latin dolōrōsus, from dolor, dolor; see dolor.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French dolerous (modern French douloureux), from Latin dolōrōsus ("painful").

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Examples

  • "Don't you? it can't be helped then!" replied he in dolorous resignation: then, with a peculiar half smile, he added, "But never mind; I imagine the squire has more to apologize for than I," and left the cottage.

    Agnes Grey 1931

  • These words uttered, she descends to earth in all her terrors, and calls dolorous Allecto from the home of the Fatal Sisters in nether gloom, whose delight is in woeful wars, in wrath and treachery and evil feuds: hateful to [327-360] lord Pluto himself, hateful and horrible to her hell-born sisters; into so many faces does she turn, so savage the guise of each, so thick and black bristles she with vipers.

    The Aeneid of Virgil 70 BC-19 BC Virgil

  • His expression was dolorous, I guess because he’d wanted to get rid of me.

    Haunted Honeymoon Marta Acosta 2010

  • But, Nabokov being Nabokov, what clinches it for me is that dismal haze — which could equally be described as a dolorous haze or you see where I’m going with this as a Dolores Haze.

    Lolita’s Ancestor - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com 2009

  • But, Nabokov being Nabokov, what clinches it for me is that dismal haze — which could equally be described as a dolorous haze or you see where I’m going with this as a Dolores Haze.

    Lolita’s Ancestor - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com 2009

  • He found a kind of dolorous amusement in seeing now much more at home all the youngsters about him seemed than he.

    The Best Short Stories of 1920 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Various 1915

  • If you removed the ultimate object – for one woman, a novel, for another, a home so perfectly created and maintained that nothing rank or dolorous could ever take root there – you had, essentially, the same effort.

    Virginia Woolf, my mother and me 2011

  • One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for company.

    Chapter 23 2010

  • In Puccini's dolorous "Crisantemi," the sense of world-weary detachment was not completely apt, the suffering held at a distance.

    Music review: The Quatuor Debussy with Katherine Chi at Library of Congress 2011

  • Even if it's a sad thing, you want to get the essence of the most dolorous phrases and connect them in some way, and so in that way try to perfect something.

    On writing: authors reveal the secrets of their craft 2011

Comments

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  • "Dolorous, Delores deplored Dorothy's departing deportment."

    August 22, 2007

  • Definitely disgraceful!

    August 22, 2007

  • Are you receiving me through steel

    dolorous Inter-City lines?

    - Peter Reading, Juncture, from For the Municipality's Elderly, 1974

    June 22, 2008

  • "Come on home now! All my bones are dolorous with vines." --Joanna Newsom

    December 1, 2008