Word.ws English Dictionary

cried the blues

cried the blues is the simple past and past participle of cry the blues.

Meaning of cry the blues

Verb

cry the blues (third-person singular simple present cries the blues, present participle crying the blues, simple past and past participle cried the blues)

  1. To sing in the style of blues music.
    • "Young people have forgotten how to cry the blues," said Big Bill Broonzy as he lay dying in a dark room above the littered streets of Chicago's Negro South Side.1958 September 1, “Best of the Blues”, in Time
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) To complain, especially in order to obtain sympathy for one's own purportedly sad situation.
    • "The average citizen gets an extreme emotional delight in ‘crying the blues’ to anyone who might lend an attentive ear."1934 October 3, “Slang Declared Barometer Of Nation's State Of Mind”, in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, retrieved 20 Nov 2008, page 15

Questions about cried the blues

What is cried the blues the simple past and past participle of?
Cried the blues is the simple past and past participle of cry the blues.

Words near cried the blues in the dictionary

  1. cried out for
  2. cried over spilt milk
  3. cried poormouth
  4. cried someone a river
  5. cried stinking fish
  6. cried the blues
  7. cried uncle
  8. cried up
  9. cried wolf
  10. criedst
  11. Crieff

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cried the blues (page history and authors); cry the blues (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cried the blues.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cried_the_blues. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.