Word.ws English Dictionary

tedium

/ˈtiː.di.əm/

tedium noun: boredom or tediousness; ennui.

tedium: boredom or tediousness; ennui
Image: Francesco Brunery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

tedium (usually uncountable, plural tediums or tedia)

  1. (usually) Boredom or tediousness; ennui.
    • Yet active life was the genuine soil for his virtues; and he sometimes suffered tedium from the monotonous succession of events in our retirement.1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter VIII, in The Last Man. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC
    • Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium.1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 192

tedium meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam

tedium in Tamil

மனச்சோர்வு, சோர்வு

tedium in Urdu

tedium
اجیر پن ajīr pan

tedium in Bengali

বিরক্তি, একঘেয়েমি, বিরক্তিকর অবস্থা

tedium in Malayalam

boredom, monotony, ennui
മടുപ്പ്, മുഷിച്ചിൽ, മുഷിവ്, ഏകതാനത, വെെചിത്ര്യശൂന്യത, വിരസത

Examples of tedium in a sentence

  • The military reframed tedium as duty.
  • To break the tedium, they built snowmen and snowwomen, and snowkids.
  • They beguile the tedium of this enforced leisure by weaving baskets and playing on certain sacred flutes.

All 13 example sentences with tedium

Synonyms of tedium

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of tedium

Forms of tedium

pluraltediums
pluraltedia
alternative Commonwealthtaedium
alternative form (archaic)tædium

Origin of tedium

From Latin taedium, from taedēre (“to weary”).

Words that rhyme with tedium

Questions about tedium

What does tedium mean?
Tedium means boredom or tediousness; ennui.
What is tedium in Tamil?
Tedium in Tamil is மனச்சோர்வு, சோர்வு. See Tedium meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is tedium?
Tedium is a noun.
How do you pronounce tedium?
Tedium is pronounced /ˈtiː.di.əm/ (UK).
What is the plural of tedium?
The plural of tedium is tediums.

Words near tedium in the dictionary

  1. tediousness
  2. tediousnesses
  3. tediousome
  4. tedisamil
  5. tedisome
  6. tedium
  7. tediums
  8. tedizolid
  9. Tedla
  10. Tedlas
  11. Tedrick

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tedium (page history and authors); tedium (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); اجیر پن (Urdu) (page history and authors); tedium (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tedium (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-tedium.wav.

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