nenia

plural nenias

1. Ancient RomeA funeral song; an elegy.

   The corpse of L’Escuyer, stretched on a bier, the ghastly head girt with laurel, is borne through the streets; with many-voiced unmelodious Nenia; funeral-wail still deeper than it is loud!

   1837, Thomas Carlyle, “Avignon”, in The French Revolution: A History […], volume II (The Constitution), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, book V (Parliament First)

   2 more examples

   Nam vinci in amore turpissimum putant, not only living, but when their friends are dead, with tombs and monuments, nenias, epitaphs elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts, anniversaries, many ages after (as Plato's scholars did) they will parentare still, omit no good office that may tend to the preservation of their names, honours, and eternal memory.

   1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], “Honest Objects of Love”, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, […], Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC

   And as I nodded, with forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my childhood: and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.

   1901, M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud