Word.ws English Dictionary

triste

/ˈtɹɪst/

triste adjective: sad; sorrowful; gloomy.

Adjective

triste (comparative more triste, superlative most triste)

  1. (rare) Sad; sorrowful; gloomy.
    • He said, he wanted them to take us to Heraclea that we might be educated so that we would be always good, and could be present with him and mamma although absent in body, which would keep them from feeling sad and lonely. But we could see that mamma and he were very, very triste. This made us...1877, R. Elton Smilie, chapter XXIX, in The Manatitlans; or A Record of Scientific Explorations in the Andean La Plata, S. A., Buenos Ayres: Calla Derécho, Imprenta De Razon, pages 399–400
    • Emmanuel Macron sounded like a man in grief. Not angry, not defiant, just a little triste.2025 October 12, Simon Tisdall, “France is not alone in its crisis of political faith – belief in a democratic world is vanishing”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Synonyms of triste

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of triste

Forms of triste

comparativemore triste
superlativemost triste
alternative formtrist

Origin of triste

Inherited from Middle English trist, triste (-e form is less common), borrowed from Old French trist, triste, from Latin trīstis (“sad, sorrowful”). Re-borrowed late 18c. (as “dull, uninteresting”) as a French word in English and often spelled triste.

Words formed from triste

Words that rhyme with triste

43 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about triste

What does triste mean?
Triste means sad; sorrowful; gloomy.
What part of speech is triste?
Triste is an adjective.
How do you pronounce triste?
Triste is pronounced /ˈtɹɪst/.

Words near triste in the dictionary

  1. tristar
  2. tristate
  3. tristated
  4. tristates
  5. tristatic
  6. triste
  7. tristearate
  8. tristearates
  9. tristearin
  10. tristearins
  11. tristed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: triste (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-triste.ogg.

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