woeful

comparative woefuller · superlative woefullest · alternative obsolete woful · alternative obsolete wofull

1. Full of woe; sorrowful; distressed with grief or calamity.

   How many woeful widows left to bow / To sad disgrace!

   1595, Samuel Daniel, “(please specify the folio number)”, in The First Fowre Bookes of the Ciuile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, London: […] P[eter] Short for Simon Waterson, →OCLC

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

2. Bringing calamity, distress, or affliction.

   a woeful event

   1 more example

   a woeful lack of restraint

   Synonyms: calamitous, disastrous, apocalyptic, calamitous, cataclysmal, cataclysmic, catastrophic, deadly

3. Lamentable, deplorable.

   Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in.

   c. 1598–1600 (date written), William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene vii], lines 1033-36

   Synonyms: rueful, woebegone, atrabiliary, atrabilious, deplorable, depressing, distressing, grievous

4. Wretched; paltry; poor.

   What woful stuff this madrigal would be / In some starv'd hackney sonneteer or me!

   1711, Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism; republished in The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902, page 72

   Synonyms: inferior, shoddy, abject, filthy, base, beggarly, blameworthy, carrion