dolour means anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow. It carries an Arena rating of 1500, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, dolour ranks #2,350 of 14,448 for Most Incisive Words, #7,082 of 14,423 for Most Sublime Words, #7,156 of 14,410 for Most Ponderous Words, #7,181 of 14,308 for Most Malleable Words.
dolour is pronounced /ˈdɒlə/.
Why “dolour” is a great word
A profound and lingering mental anguish, a grief that resides in the spirit rather than the flesh. From Middle English *dolour*, via Anglo-Norman and Old French from Latin *dolor* ("pain, grief"), itself from *dolēre* ("to grieve, suffer"), rooted in the Proto-Indo-European **delh₁-* ("to divide, split"). Unlike "sorrow," which suggests a feeling of loss one may someday overcome, or "pain," which primarily denotes the body’s raw distress, *dolour* is the specific, literary weight of a sorrow that has taken up permanent residence. It is the grey light of a long-deferred dawn, the hollow echo in a room once filled with a familiar voice, and the slow erosion of a soul weathered by absence—the quiet, enduring tax on having loved anything at all.
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], 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). The English word is a doublet of dol.
noun
- Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.“Who dyes the vtmoſt dolor doth abye, / But who that liues, is lefte to waile his loſſe: / So life is loſſe, and death felicity.”
- In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.“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 […]”
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