sob story
sob story noun: a sad story, especially one intended to elicit sympathy.
Noun
sob story (plural sob stories)
- A sad story, especially one intended to elicit sympathy.
- "Dis picture is called De Tale o' Two Cities, and it's de French revolution. It's about a feller vot takes anodder feller's place and gits his head cut off; and say, dere's a sob story in it vot's a vunder."1922, Upton Sinclair, chapter 14, in They call Me Carpenter
- Mr. Martin objected at first to the bastardization of my talent, but I gave him a sob story about needing money for lessons.2006, Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child, →ISBN, page 56
Forms of sob story
| plural | sob stories |
|---|
Questions about sob story
- What does sob story mean?
- Sob story means a sad story, especially one intended to elicit sympathy.
- What part of speech is sob story?
- Sob story is a noun.
- What is the plural of sob story?
- The plural of sob story is sob stories.
Words near sob story in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sob story (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sob story.ogg.
Cite this entry: “sob story.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sob_story. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.