taedium

The procession along the sacred road from Athens to Eleusis (see Wordsworth’s Greece, p. 145) used to wile the taedium of the journey with these banterings, as the ‘Canterbury Pilgrimage’ in the time of Chaucer appears to have done.

1877, F. A. Paley, Aristophanis Ranae. The ‘Frogs’ of Aristophanes, a Revised Text with English Notes, and a Preface, Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co. London: George Bell and Sons, pages 39–40, columns 2–1

Yet if the cure of physical maladies is beyond the physicians prescriptions, we may at least recreate and relieve the mind from the effects of the taedium and ennui arising from the sameness of routine life by transferring ourselves to epochs of thought differing from our own.

1886 September, Prof. Bloombergh, “La Chanson de Roland”, in The Lafayette, volume XII, page 79, columns 1–2

Other men I have known to whom a round of Golf was so casual and frivolous a pass-time that they would seek to relieve the taedium of the game (and perhaps entertain you!) by the narration between strokes of interminable and pointless anecdotes.

1904, Arnold Haultain, “The Mystery of Golf”, in The Atlantic Monthly, volume 94, page 90

In the following year it was even rumored in Edinburgh that Waverly was written by Jeffrey “to lighten the taedium of his transatlantic voyage.”

1941, The New England Quarterly, page 316

Vanished was the taedium that killed the July Monarchy (“France is bored!”), the listlessness, the shrugging of weary shoulders, the raising of sceptical eyebrows, that were to beset the Third Republic—and the Fourth.

1954, The American Society Legion of Honor Magazine, volume 25, page 354