dolour

Meaning

  1. (UK, literary, uncountable) Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
  2. (UK, countable) In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.

Opposite of
elation, felicity, happiness, joy, hedon, util, utile, utilon
Pronounced as (IPA)
/ˈdɒlə/
Etymology

In summary

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.

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