woeful

English

From Middle English woful, waful, equivalent to woe +‎ -ful. Compare Old English wālīċ (“woeful”), Old English tēonful (“woeful”).

woeful (comparative woefuller, superlative woefullest)

Full of woe; sorrowful; distressed with grief or calamity.
- 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:
  How many woeful widows left to bow / To sad disgrace!
Bringing calamity, distress, or affliction.
a woeful event

a woeful lack of restraint
Lamentable, deplorable.
- 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:
  Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
  This wide and universal theatre
  Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
  Wherein we play in.
Wretched; paltry; poor.
- 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:
  What woful stuff this madrigal would be / In some starv'd hackney sonneteer or me!

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