Search the Dictionary

le or grief; expressing or exciting sorrow; sorrowful; sad; dismal. With screwed face and doleful whine. South. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades. Milton.

To require; to demand; to claim. [Obs.] A doleful case desires a doleful song. Spenser.

Doleful; dismal; gloomy; sorrowful. -- Dole"some*ly, adv. -- Dole"some*ness, n.

Full of grief; sad; sorrowful; doleful; dismal; as, a dolorous object; dolorous discourses. You take me in too dolorous a sense; I spake to you for your comfort. Shak.

ncy; ill humor; -- now used only in the plural. March slowly on in solemn dump. Hudibras. Doleful dumps the mind oppress. Shak. I was musing in the midst of my dumps. Bunyan.

Lamentable; doleful. [R.] "Funest and direful deaths." Coleridge. A forerunner of something very funest. Evelyn.

A tale of sorrow, disappointment, or complaint; a doleful story; a dolorous tirade; -- generally used satirically. He has prolonged his complaint into an endless jeremiad. Lamb.

Mournful; indicating sorrow, often ridiculously or feignedly; doleful; woful; pitiable; as, a whining tone and a lugubrious look. Crossbones, scythes, hourglasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality. Hawthorne. -- Lu*gu"bri*ous*ly, adv. -- Lu*gu"bri*ous*ness, n.

To mutter; as prayers. [The hooded clouds] patter their doleful prayers. Longfellow. To patter flash, to talk in thieves' cant. [Slang]

In a woeful manner; sorrowfully; mournfully; miserably; dolefully.