Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Extreme, persistent sadness or hopelessness; depression. No longer in clinical use.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In pathology, a mental condition characterized by great depression combined with a sluggishness and apparent painfulness of mental action.
- noun Same as
melancholy , 2.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Med.) A kind of mental unsoundness characterized by extreme depression of spirits, ill-grounded fears, delusions, and brooding over one particular subject or train of ideas.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Deep sadness or
gloom ;melancholy - noun Clinical depression, characterised by irrational fears,
guilt andapathy
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun extreme depression characterized by tearful sadness and irrational fears
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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At least since the twelfth century, the term melancholia has been used to identify depressive illness.
The Neuropsychiatric Guide to Modern Everyday Psychiatry Michael Alan Taylor 1993
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Since the seventeenth century, the term melancholia has been used to in a stricter, modern meaning.
The Neuropsychiatric Guide to Modern Everyday Psychiatry Michael Alan Taylor 1993
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That phrase is so closely associated with the legendary prime minister that one assumes he coined it, but he probably got the term from his childhood nanny, and it shows up as a euphemism for melancholia all the way back to the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson .
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That phrase is so closely associated with the legendary prime minister that one assumes he coined it, but he probably got the term from his childhood nanny, and it shows up as a euphemism for melancholia all the way back to the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson .
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They're not for our benefit after all: the pleasure we get from them, the sweeter form of melancholia, is a bonus.
Why woodlands are wonderful Colin Tudge 2010
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Louis Bayard on Against Happiness by Eric G. Wilson: Wilson's idea of melancholia is thoroughly Romantic and more than a little romantic.
An Amazon.com Books Blog featuring news, reviews, interviews and guest author blogs. 2008
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Freud famously argues apropos of the processes of identification involved in melancholia that 'the shadow of the object falls on the ego.'
The Ordinary Sky: Wordsworth, Blanchot, and the Writing of Disaster 2008
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Whereas in melancholia the ego is vampirized by the introjected object, in mania the libido turns with ravenous hunger to the external world of objects; whatever appears before the manic's rapidly advancing probe is swallowed.
'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_ 2006
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Anyway, melancholia is part of the Christmas spirit.
unbillable hours: 2004
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Anyway, melancholia is part of the Christmas spirit.
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