Lamentation
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The act of lamenting. countable, uncountable
"About John Marin, there move sad, disgruntled beings, full of talk and lamentations. [...] They bewail the fact that in America, soil is poor and unconducive to growth, and men remain unmoved by growing green. But Marin persists, and what ebullience and good humour, in the rocky ungentle loam?"
- 2 the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing grief wordnet
- 3 A sorrowful cry; a lament. countable, uncountable
- 4 a cry of sorrow and grief wordnet
- 5 Specifically, mourning. countable, uncountable
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- 6 lamentatio, (part of) a liturgical Bible text (from the book of Job) and its musical settings, usually in the plural; hence, any dirge countable, uncountable
- 7 A group of swans. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"And they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is situated beyond the Jordan: where celebrating the exequies with a great and vehement lamentation, they spent full seven days."
Etymology
Recorded since 1375, from Latin lāmentātiō (“wailing, moaning, weeping”), from the deponent verb lāmentor, from lāmentum (“wail; wailing”), itself from a Proto-Indo-European *leh₂- (“to howl”), presumed ultimately imitative. Replaced Old English cwiþan. Lament is a 16th-century back-formation.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.