dolour
/ˈdoʊlɚ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.16 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.
British usage; Countable
Example Sentences
- "Who dyes the vtmoſt dolor doth abye, / But who that liues, is lefte to waile his loſſe: / So life is loſſe, and death felicity."
- "But for all this thou ſhalt haue as many Dolors for thy Daughters, as thou canſt tell in a yeare."
- "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."
- "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."
- "[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; […]"
- "[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!"
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈdoʊlɚ/
- British English: /ˈdɒlə/
Usage
- British usage
- Literary
- Uncountable
- Countable