Word.ws English Dictionary

dolour

Syllables: dol·our/ˈdɒlə//ˈdoʊlɚ/

dolour noun: anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.

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
    • But for all this thou ſhalt haue as many Dolors for thy Daughters, as thou canſt tell in a yeare.c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  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

dolour meaning in Urdu, Malayalam and Malay

dolour in Urdu

الم, درد, دکھ, غم, ماتم, رنج

dolour in Malayalam

misery, suffering, distress
നോവ്, ദുരിതം, ക്ലേശം, കഷ്ടത, കഷ്ടപ്പാട്, അരിഷ്ടം

dolour in Malay

anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow — see also sorrow
kesedihan

Examples of dolour in a sentence

  • Dolour comes to him indeed, you haue ſpoken truer then you purpos'd / Seb.1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First...
  • [E]very ſentence of that Book, every groan of that Man [Francesco Spiera], with all the reſt of his actions in his dolours, […] was as knives and daggers in my Soul; […]1692, John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: […], 7th edition, London: […] Robert Ponder, […], →OCLC, paragraph 164, page 78:
  • [T]o think that I am going to leave her—and to leave her in distress and dolour—No, Miss Lucy, you need never think it!1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter XV, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co....
  • Perchance a congregation to fulfil / Solemnities of silence in this doom, / Mysterious rites of dolour and despair / Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?1870–1874, James Thomson, “The City of Dreadful Night”, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems, London: Reeves and Turner, […]...

Synonyms of dolour

Antonyms

Forms of dolour

pluraldolours
alternative formdolor

Origin of dolour

From Middle English dolour (“physical pain, agony, suffering; painful disease; anguish, grief, misery, sorrow; grieving for sins, contrition; hardship, misery, trouble; cause of grief or suffering, affliction”) [and other forms], from Anglo-Norman dolour, Old French dolour, dolor, dulur (“pain”) (modern French douleur (“pain; distress”)), from Latin dolor (“ache, hurt, pain; anguish, grief, sorrow; anger, indignation, resentment”), from doleō (“to hurt, suffer physical pain; to deplore, grieve, lament”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *delh₁- (“to divide, split”)) + -or (suffix forming third-declension masculine abstract nouns). The English word is a doublet of dol.

Words that rhyme with dolour

Questions about dolour

What does dolour mean?
Dolour means anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
What is dolour in Urdu?
Dolour in Urdu is الم, درد, دکھ. See Dolour meaning in Urdu.
How do you use dolour in a sentence?
Dolour comes to him indeed, you haue ſpoken truer then you purpos'd / Seb.
What part of speech is dolour?
Dolour is a noun.
How do you pronounce dolour?
Dolour is pronounced /ˈdɒlə/ (UK).
What is the plural of dolour?
The plural of dolour is dolours.

Words near dolour in the dictionary

  1. dolosely
  2. dolosity
  3. dolosse
  4. dolostone
  5. dolostones
  6. dolour
  7. dolourous
  8. dolourously
  9. dolourousness
  10. dolours
  11. Dolowich

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dolour (page history and authors); dolour (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); dolour (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-dolour.wav, En-us-dolour.oga.

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