# forlorn

Pronunciation: US say "fur-LORN" /fɚˈlɔɹn/; UK/AUS say "fuh-LAWN" /fəˈlɔːn/

## Adjective

1. Pitifully sad and wretched; lonely and miserable, especially from feeling abandoned or forsaken.
   - Simple: Very sad and lonely, often because you feel that others have left you alone.
   - _After his wife left, he wandered the empty house, forlorn and unable to sleep._
   - _The forlorn expression on the boy's face made her hand him the last cookie._
2. Abandoned or deserted; left behind by others.
   - Simple: Left behind or left alone by others.
   - _A few forlorn shacks were all that remained of the old mining town._
   - _Boarded windows and a shuttered diner gave the main street a forlorn look._
3. Unlikely to succeed; hopeless.
   - Simple: Not likely to work or succeed.
   - _Rescuers kept digging through the night in the forlorn hope of finding more survivors._
   - _The team made a forlorn effort to tie the game in the final seconds._

## Noun

4. A forlorn hope: a band of soldiers sent ahead of the main force to lead a very dangerous attack, or a soldier in such a band. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: A group of soldiers sent first into a very dangerous attack, or one of those soldiers.

## Origin

Old English forloren was the past participle of forlēosan ("to lose") and became Middle English forlorn or forloren. Behind it is Proto-Germanic *fraluzanaz ("lost"), and the word is equivalent to for- + lorn. Dutch and German verloren and Swedish förlorad, all meaning "lost," are related.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/forlorn (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).