dolour
English · Thesaurus
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dolour
- /ˈdɒlə/ UK
- /ˈdəʊlə/ UK
- /ˈdoʊlɚ/ US
Sounds like dollar (some accents) · Rhymes with -ɒlə(ɹ), -əʊlə(ɹ)
Where it comes from
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 dolours · dolor
-
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.
Similar: infelicity, joylessness, sadness, unhappiness, unjoy · Opposite: elation, felicity, happiness, joy
- 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 […]
Translations
Talk about this word "dolour." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/dolour. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. dolour. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/dolour "dolour." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/dolour.Cite this
@misc{dolour_2026,
title = {dolour},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/dolour},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
