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atrabiliousness

Definitions

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

  • noun The state or quality of being characterized by melancholy or glumness.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin ātra bīlis ("black bile").

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Examples

  • All this political atrabiliousness did not improve Alfieri's temper; and could not have made it easier or more agreeable to live with him.

    The Countess of Albany Vernon Lee 1895

  • Mrs. Reed -- a soured, disappointed woman of forty, who still carried in her small dark eyes and thin handsome lips something of the bitterness and antagonism of the typical "Southern rights" woman; nor of her two daughters, Octavia and Augusta, whose languid atrabiliousness seemed a part of the mourning they still wore.

    Sally Dows Bret Harte 1869

  • You are full of sourness, hypochondria, gall, bad humour, biliousness and atrabiliousness I am fearful of all this on our account.

    The Memoirs of Victor Hugo Victor Hugo 1843

  • Translator suffers a portion, however small, of his _own_ atrabiliousness, to be mixed up with the work translated: nor is it always safe for a third person to judge of the merits of the original through such a medium.

    A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One Thomas Frognall Dibdin 1811

Comments

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  • JM was sanguine most of the day except for a short period of atrabiliousness (which he is phlegmatic about).

    February 1, 2009