from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun The act of lamenting.
noun A lament.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun The act of bewailing; expression of sorrow; a mournful outcry.
noun plural The shorter title of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, one of the poetical books of the Old Testament.
noun plural The music to which the first three lessons, taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, are sung in the Roman Catholic Church, in the office called Tenebræ, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun The act of bewailing; audible expression of sorrow; wailing; moaning.
noun (Script.) A book of the Old Testament attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, and taking its name from the nature of its contents.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun The act of lamenting.
noun A sorrowfulcry; a lament.
noun Specifically, mourning.
noun lamentatio, (part of) a liturgical Bible text (from the book of Job) and its musical settings, usually in the plural; hence, any dirge
noun A group of swans.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing grief
noun a cry of sorrow and grief
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
recorded since 1375, from Latin lamentatio ("wailing, moaning, weeping"), from the deponent verb lāmentor, from lāmentum ("wail; wailing"), itself from a Proto-Indo-European *la- (“to shout, cry”), presumed ultimately imitative. Replaced Old English cwiþan. Lament is a 16th-century back-formation.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word lamentation.
Examples
So, too, the poetry of grief and lamentation is one of the deepest and most long-standing elements in poetry.
“O my lord, my lamentation is for thee, because thou art in sore straits, for all thy fair fortune and goodliness and exceeding comeliness, seeing thou hast naught wherewithal to do and receive delight, like unto other men.”
When it arrived, the people of Baghdad went forth to meet it and I went forth with them: and I saw the damsel among the women and she the loudest of them in lamentation, crying out and wailing with a voice that rent the vitals and made the heart ache.
Talk to them of education; they will readily acknowledge that it's "a braw thing to be weel learned," and begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.