dolour
English
WOTD – 15 April 2022
Etymology
From Middle English dolour (“physical pain, agony, suffering; painful disease; anguish, grief, misery, sorrow; grieving for sins, contrition; hardship, misery, trouble; cause of grief or suffering, affliction”) [and other forms],[1] from Anglo-Norman dolour, Old French dolour, dolor, dulur (“pain”) (modern French douleur (“pain; distress”)), from Latin dolor (“ache, hurt, pain; anguish, grief, sorrow; anger, indignation, resentment”), from doleō (“to hurt, suffer physical pain; to deplore, grieve, lament”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *delh₁- (“to divide, split”)) + -or (suffix forming third-declension masculine abstract nouns).[2] The English word is a doublet of dol.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈdɒlə/, /ˈdəʊlə/
Audio (Southern England) (file) (file) - (General American) IPA(key): /ˈdoʊlɚ/
Audio (GA) (file) - Homophone: dollar (some accents)
- Rhymes: -ɒlə(ɹ), -əʊlə(ɹ)
- Hyphenation: dol‧our
Noun
dolour (countable and uncountable, plural dolours) (British spelling)
- (chiefly uncountable, literary) Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
- Synonyms: infelicity, joylessness, sadness, unhappiness, unjoy
- Antonyms: elation, felicity, happiness, joy
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 38, page 455:
- Who dyes the vtmoſt dolor doth abye, / But who that liues, is lefte to waile his loſſe: / So life is loſſe, and death felicity.
- c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iv], page 293, column 2:
- But for all this thou ſhalt haue as many Dolors for thy Daughters, as thou canſt tell in a yeare.
- 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene i], page 6, column 2:
- Gon[zalo]. When euery greefe is entertaind, / That's offer'd comes to th'entertainer. / Seb[astian]. A dollor. / Gon. Dolour comes to him indeed, you haue ſpoken truer then you purpos'd / Seb. You haue taken it wiſelier then I meant you ſhould.
- 1611, Iohn Speed [i.e., John Speed], “Marie Queene of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. The Sixtieth Monarch of the English, Her Raigne, Mariage, Acts, and Death.”, in The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of yͤ Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. […], London: […] William Hall and John Beale, for John Sudbury and George Humble, […], →OCLC, book IX ([Englands Monarchs] […]), paragraph 32, page 819, column 1:
- This Duke (ſaith [Richard] Grafton) being an aged man, and fortunate before in all his vvarres, vpon this diſtaſture impreſſed ſuch dolour of mind, that for verie griefe thereof he liued not long after.
- 1692, John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: […], 7th edition, London: […] Robert Ponder, […], →OCLC, paragraph 164, page 78:
- [E]very ſentence of that Book, every groan of that Man [Francesco Spiera], with all the reſt of his actions in his dolours, […] was as knives and daggers in my Soul; […]
- 1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter XV, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and Archibald Constable and Co., […], →OCLC, page 240:
- [T]o think that I am going to leave her—and to leave her in distress and dolour—No, Miss Lucy, you need never think it!
- 1870–1874, James Thomson, “The City of Dreadful Night”, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems, London: Reeves and Turner, […], published 1880, →OCLC, part X, stanza 2, pages 25–26:
- Perchance a congregation to fulfil / Solemnities of silence in this doom, / Mysterious rites of dolour and despair / Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?
- (countable, economics, ethics) In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.
- 1986, Rosemarie Tong, Ethics in Policy Analysis (Occupational Ethics Series), Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, →ISBN, page 16:
- Supposedly, utilitarians are able to add and subtract hedons (units of pleasure) and dolors (units of pain) without any signs of cognitive or affective distress […]
Alternative forms
- dolor (American spelling)
Related terms
Translations
anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow — see also sorrow
|
in economics and utilitarianism: unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people’s outcomes
References
- “dōlǒur, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.
- Compare “dolour | dolor, n.”, in OED Online
, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2021; “dolour, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
Further reading
sorrow (emotion) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Old French
Noun
dolour oblique singular, f (oblique plural dolours, nominative singular dolour, nominative plural dolours)
- Late Anglo-Norman spelling of dulur
- qi purroit penser ou ymaginer la dolour et les peynes qe vous, ma douz Dame, endurastes.
- Who could think of or imagine the pain and the suffering that you, my dear lady, have endured.
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