dolour
UK /ˈdɒlə/ · US /ˈdoʊlɚ/ noun
Forms dolours dolor
- noun (chiefly uncountable, literary) Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
- noun (countable, economics, ethics) In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.
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Etymology
From Middle English dolour (“physical pain, agony, suffering; painful disease; anguish, grief, misery, sorrow; grieving for sins, contrition; hardship, misery, trouble; cause of grief or suffering, affliction”) [and other forms], from Anglo-Norman dolour, Old French dolour, dolor, dulur (“pain”) (modern French douleur (“pain; distress”)), from Latin dolor (“ache, hurt, pain; anguish, grief, sorrow; anger, indignation, resentment”), from doleō (“to hurt, suffer physical pain; to deplore, grieve, lament”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *delh₁- (“to divide, split”)) + -or (suffix forming third-declension masculine abstract nouns). The English word is a doublet of dol.
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 — from the Wiktionary entry “dolour”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details