Word.ws English Dictionary

woefullest

woefullest is the superlative form of woeful.

Meaning of woeful

Adjective

woeful (comparative woefuller, superlative woefullest)

  1. Full of woe; sorrowful; distressed with grief or calamity.
    • How many woeful widows left to bow / To sad disgrace!1595, Samuel Daniel, “(please specify the folio number)”, in The First Fowre Bookes of the Ciuile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, London: […] P[eter] Short for Simon Waterson...
  2. Bringing calamity, distress, or affliction.
    • a woeful event
  3. Lamentable, deplorable.
    • Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
      This wide and universal theatre
      Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
      Wherein we play in.c. 1598–1600 (date written), William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  4. Wretched; paltry; poor.
    • What woful stuff this madrigal would be / In some starv'd hackney sonneteer or me!1711, Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism; republished in The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902, page 72

Questions about woefullest

What is woefullest the superlative form of?
Woefullest is the superlative form of woeful.

Words near woefullest in the dictionary

  1. woebegones
  2. woebetide
  3. woefare
  4. woeful
  5. woefuller
  6. woefullest
  7. woefully
  8. woefulness
  9. woegeous
  10. woegeously
  11. Woehler

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: woefullest (page history and authors); woeful (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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Cite this entry: “woefullest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/woefullest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.