Word.ws English Dictionary

dolor

dolor is the alternative spelling of dolour.

Meaning of dolour

Noun

dolour (countable and uncountable, plural dolours)

  1. (UK, literary, uncountable) Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
    • Who dyes the vtmoſt dolor doth abye, / But who that liues, is lefte to waile his loſſe: / So life is loſſe, and death felicity.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 38, page 455
  2. (UK, countable) In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.
    • Supposedly, utilitarians are able to add and subtract hedons (units of pleasure) and dolors (units of pain) without any signs of cognitive or affective distress […]1986, Rosemarie Tong, Ethics in Policy Analysis (Occupational Ethics Series), Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, →ISBN, page 16
    Synonyms:
    dol
    Antonyms:
    hedon, util, utile, utilon

Forms of dolor

pluraldolors

Words formed from dolor

Questions about dolor

What is dolor the alternative spelling of?
Dolor is the alternative spelling of dolour.

Words near dolor in the dictionary

  1. dolomization
  2. dolomized
  3. dolomol
  4. dolon
  5. dolonal
  6. dolor
  7. Dolores
  8. Dolores County
  9. doloresite
  10. doloriferous
  11. dolorific

Source and license

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