Word of the Day

: November 22, 2006

dolorous

adjective DOH-luh-rus

What It Means

: causing, marked by, or expressing misery or grief

dolorous in Context

After listening to Charlene's dolorous hard-luck tale, Jonathan was moved to lend her money for hospital bills, rent, and groceries.

Did You Know?

"No medicine may prevail . . . till the same dolorous tooth be . . . plucked up by the roots." When "dolorous" first appeared around 1400, it was linked to physical pain -- and appropriately so, since the word is a descendant of the Latin word "dolor," meaning "pain" as well as "grief." (Today, "dolor" is also an English word meaning "sorrow.") When the British surgeon John Banister wrote the above quotation in 1578, "dolorous" could mean either "causing pain" or "distressful, sorrowful." "The death of the earl [was] dolorous to all Englishmen," the English historian Edward Hall had written a few decades earlier. The "causing pain" sense of "dolorous" coexisted with the "sorrowful" sense for centuries before slipping from use in the 19th century.