Word.ws English Dictionary

despaire

despaire is the obsolete spelling of despair.

Meaning of despair

Noun

despair (countable and uncountable, plural despairs)

  1. Loss of hope; utter hopelessness; complete despondency.
    • He turned around in despair, aware that he was not going to survive.
    Antonyms:
    hope, respair
  2. That which causes despair.
  3. That which is despaired of.

See all 6 meanings of despair

Forms of despaire

pluraldespaires

Questions about despaire

What is despaire the obsolete spelling of?
Despaire is the obsolete spelling of despair.

Words near despaire in the dictionary

  1. despaghettify
  2. despaghettifying
  3. Despain
  4. Despains
  5. despair
  6. despaire
  7. despaired
  8. despairer
  9. despairers
  10. despairest
  11. despaireth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: despaire (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “despaire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/despaire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.