Word.ws English Dictionary

crying the blues

crying the blues is the present participle and gerund 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 crying the blues

What is crying the blues the present participle and gerund of?
Crying the blues is the present participle and gerund of cry the blues.

Words near crying the blues in the dictionary

  1. crying rooms
  2. crying shame
  3. crying shames
  4. crying someone a river
  5. crying stinking fish
  6. crying the blues
  7. crying uncle
  8. crying up
  9. crying wolf
  10. cryingly
  11. cryings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crying 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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Cite this entry: “crying the blues.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crying_the_blues. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.