dolorous

comparative more dolorous · superlative most dolorous · alternative dolourous

1. Solemnly or ponderously sad.

   . . . Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

   1645, John Milton, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, stanza 14

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   Through dolorous despaire, which she conceyved, Into the Sea her selfe did headlong throw, Thinking to have her griefe by death bereaved.

   1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

   From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer and nearer to destruction, I send you . . . the assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service.

   1859, Charles Dickens, chapter 30, in A Tale of Two Cities

   She turned and waved a hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn't hear it, it was a lost word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the dolorous crypt of winter.

   1922, Michael Arlen, “3/2/1”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days

   The dolorous effects of the second world war on train services, and its protracted legacies of over-age equipment and shortages of material for replacement, are too fresh in memory to require recapitulation here; […].

   1957 July 28, D. S. M. Barrie, “Sixty Years of British Express Trains”, in Railway Magazine, pages 455-456

   As World War II came to a close, the gaunt and dolorous child was liberated at yet another death camp, Buchenwald.

   2001 June 24, Stefan Kanfer, “Author, Teacher, Witness”, in Time