Word.ws English Dictionary

gallows humour

gallows humour is the alternative spelling of gallows humor.

Meaning of gallows humor

Noun

gallows humor (uncountable)

  1. (US, idiomatic) A form of comedy that still manages to be humorous in the face of, and in response to, a tragic or hopeless situation.
    • Author Neumann defiantly admits why he wrote this historical-romantic farce: "Because I wanted to fight against the general and my personal depression, and because in hard and bad times there is always one tragicomic feeling in place—gallows humor."1931, "German Falstaff" (review of The Mirror of Fools by Alfred Neumann), Time, 16 Jan.

Questions about gallows humour

What is gallows humour the alternative spelling of?
Gallows humour is the alternative spelling of gallows humor.

Words near gallows humour in the dictionary

  1. gallows frame
  2. gallows frames
  3. gallows god
  4. gallows gods
  5. gallows humor
  6. gallows humour
  7. gallows tree
  8. gallows trees
  9. gallows-bird
  10. gallows-birds
  11. gallows-bitts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gallows humour (page history and authors); gallows humor (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.

Last updated:

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