Definition of DOLOUR

dolour

Plural: dolours

Noun

  • (poetry) painful grief
  • Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
  • In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.

Origin / 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.

Scrabble Score: 7

dolour is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL word
dolour is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
dolour is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary

Words With Friends Score: 9

dolour is a valid Words With Friends word