Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A person affected with melancholia; a melancholy maniac.

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

  • noun someone subject to melancholia

Etymologies

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Examples

  • He went so far as to question Scripture: "If there are thus no other signs necessary to demon possession, than those which are described by the Evangelists, [then] every epileptic, melancholiac, phrenetic, will have the devil in their body: and there will be more demoniacs in the world than fools."

    Carleton Cunningham: The Devil and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century France Carleton Cunningham 1993

  • The posture and expression remind us at once of the katatonia which is symptomatic of dementia præcox and other stuporose and melancholiac conditions in adult life.

    The Nervous Child Hector Charles Cameron

  • I daresay I _am_ -- but I _do_ object to being made out a hopeless melancholiac!

    Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 101, August 29, 1891 Various

  • If a melancholiac is able to do anything he wants, whom can he accuse?

    How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Dale Carnegie 1944

  • This blubberer who had followed me home in the snow, yes this insufferable melancholiac who rained his tears into my Heaven -- Mallare would have killed him.

    Fantazius Mallare A Mysterious Oath Ben Hecht 1929

  • She was as used to loneliness as a hotel melancholiac; the people they had known had drifted away to far suburbs.

    The Innocents A Story for Lovers Sinclair Lewis 1918

  • A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac.

    Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals William James 1876

  • I do not know, even now as I write, how it was that Sir Edmund met his end, whether he had killed himself, as I think -- for he was of a melancholiac disposition, as was his father and his grandfather before him -- or whether, as indeed I think possible, he was murdered by the very man who swore so many Catholic lives away, by way of giving colour to his own designs -- for if a man will swear away twenty lives, what should hinder him from taking one?

    Oddsfish! Robert Hugh Benson 1892

  • A melancholiac’s first memory is generally something like this: I remember I wanted to lie on the couch, but my brother was lying there.

    How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Dale Carnegie 1944

  • Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation. [

    The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902

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