woe is me

Significado (Inglés)

Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.

Conceptos

ay de mí

Sinónimos

woe

oh no

ah

Traducciones

οίμοι

o weh

weh mir

ai de mim

Pronunciado como (IPA)

/ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/

Etimología (Inglés)

Cognado con alemán: Weh ist mir

Cognado con yidis: 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.