Word.ws English Dictionary

mal du siècle

/ˌmæl.duˈsjɛk.l(ə)/

mal du siècle noun: apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past, originally in the context of French Romanticism; Weltschmerz.

Noun

mal du siècle (uncountable)

  1. Apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past, originally in the context of French Romanticism; Weltschmerz.
    • A fashion prevailed in France, a generation or two ago, — originating, perhaps, in the vogue of Réné^([sic – meaning René]), — of calling this atrophy of the spirit by the special misnomer of the mal du siècle. In truth, it is a malady of all the ages, raging, like other plagues, with greater...1884 July, Harriet Waters Preston, “The Gospel of Defeat”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN
    • Both are struggling hard with the mal du siècle, the Romantic disease of the imagination, that makes it so difficult to convert private dreams into sustained social realities.1987 February 8, Richard Holmes, “Hot and Bothered in Paris and London”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Examples of mal du siècle in a sentence

  • The mal du siècle was a motion sickness.1996, Hillel Schwartz, Century's End: an orientation manual toward the year 2000, revised and abridged edition, New York: Doubleday, →ISBN...
  • [Michael] Gove started carrying Eurosceptic books as a sign of his mal du siècle:[…]2016 February 24, Nadia Khomami, “The truth about Michael Gove on the EU (and his love of orange corduroys)”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Origin of mal du siècle

Borrowed from French mal du siècle (literally “disease of the century”).

Questions about mal du siècle

What does mal du siècle mean?
Mal du siècle means apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past, originally in the context of French Romanticism; Weltschmerz.
How do you use mal du siècle in a sentence?
The mal du siècle was a motion sickness.
What part of speech is mal du siècle?
Mal du siècle is a noun.
How do you pronounce mal du siècle?
Mal du siècle is pronounced /ˌmæl.duˈsjɛk.l(ə)/.

Words near mal du siècle in the dictionary

  1. makwa
  2. Makynlee
  3. mal
  4. mal de mer
  5. mal du pays
  6. mal du siècle
  7. mal du Suisse
  8. mal mariée
  9. mal mariées
  10. mal-
  11. Mal-ay

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mal du siècle (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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