Word.ws English Dictionary

compare and despair

compare and despair verb: to distress oneself by comparing one's own situation with that of others who seem more successful.

Verb

compare and despair (third-person singular simple present compares and despairs, present participle comparing and despairing, simple past and past participle compared and despaired)

  1. To distress oneself by comparing one's own situation with that of others who seem more successful.
    • We are now on a path, a pilgrimage, a journey, an adventure, and we must now begin to pay more attention. Look at the signs guiding you, look at those who ambush you, even the weather of your own moods defines whether you succeed or not. One of the other damaging evils we do to ourselves is compare...2011, C. Stephen Foster, Awakening the Actor Within
    • Thanks to social media, the opportunity to compare and despair is only ever a click away. We can instantly see what we haven't got and the places we haven't been invited to.2017, Gillian Anderson, Jennifer Nadel, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, page 162

Forms of compare and despair

third-person singular presentcompares and despairs
present participlecomparing and despairing
past participlecompared and despaired
pastcompared and despaired

Questions about compare and despair

What does compare and despair mean?
Compare and despair means to distress oneself by comparing one's own situation with that of others who seem more successful.
What part of speech is compare and despair?
Compare and despair is a verb.
What is the past tense of compare and despair?
The past tense of compare and despair is compared and despaired.

Words near compare and despair in the dictionary

  1. comparativity
  2. comparator
  3. comparators
  4. compare
  5. compare and contrast
  6. compare and despair
  7. compare apples to apples
  8. compare apples with apples
  9. compare notes
  10. compareable
  11. compared

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: compare and despair (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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