Word.ws English Dictionary

cries the blues

cries the blues is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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 cries the blues

What is cries the blues the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Cries the blues is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cry the blues.

Words near cries the blues in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cries 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.

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