tristful

comparative more tristful · superlative most tristful · alternative tristeful

1. archaicSad, melancholic.

   1771, Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton, London: T. Davies & T. Cadell, Volume 2, Letter 46, p. 184, I think, I want nothing but a ’squire as tristful as yourself, to record my misadventures in the stile of a ballad, called the Disastrous Traveller […]

   4 more examples

   Be mindefull still of my presumpteous crime, Which forced me to tell this tristfull tale.

   1579, Anthony Munday, The Mirrour of Mutabilitie, London, Book 2, “The Complaint of Adonia Sonne, to King Dauid,” Remember me which past before your time, Remember how I fell from blisse to bale

   […] Heaven’s face doth glow; Yea, this solidity and compound mass, With tristful visage, as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act.

   c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene iv]

   […] So shine thy tristfull light With pallid Ray, and with strange Horrour, fright The world:

   1648, Seneca the Younger, translated by Edward Sherburne, Medea, London: Humphrey Moseley, act IV, scene 2, page 42

   A wistful look in your mirror, and an air of tristful languor in public, and a sense of being deeper than you thought you were, if you ever thought about it at all.

   1927, Warwick Deeping, Doomsday, Part 3, Chapter 24

   Synonyms: miserable, sorrowful, atrabiliary, atrabilious, blitheless, dispirited, blue, bummed out