woe is me

Betekenis (Engels)

Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.

Sinonieme

woe

oh no

ah

Vertalings

οίμοι

o weh

weh mir

ai de mim

ay de mí

Uitgespreek as (IPA)

/ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/

Etimologie (Engels)

Verwante met Duits: Weh ist mir

Verwante met Jiddisj: וויי איז מיר

In summary

Here, the oblique pronoun me denotes not an informal copulative complement (as in this is me), but an indirect object, wherefore it literally means woe is to me, an obsolete way of saying I feel woe; compare German mir ist traurig (“I feel sad”, literally “to-me [it] is sad”). Idiomatically, it means woe is upon me. See also German weh ist mir and its descendant, Yiddish וויי איז מיר (vey iz mir), which are identical in form and meaning to the English expression.