# melancholy

Pronunciation: US say "MEL-uhn-kah-lee" /ˈmɛl.ənˌkɑ.li/; UK say "MEL-uhn-kuh-lee" /ˈmɛlənkəli/

## Adjective

1. Weighed down by deep sadness or depression. *(literary)*
   - Simple: Feeling very sad and low.
   - _Melancholy travelers sat in silence as the train crawled on through the rain._
   - _He grew melancholy in the long northern winters and seldom left the house._
4. Sad in effect or character: bringing on sorrow, or giving voice to it or hinting at it.
   - Simple: Making you feel sad, or showing or seeming to show sadness.
   - _The film ends on a melancholy note, with the two friends going their separate ways._
   - _Rain dripped from the eaves with a soft, melancholy sound all afternoon._

## Noun

2. A deep sadness or depression, especially a thoughtful or inward-looking one.
   - Simple: Deep sadness, often the kind where you think a lot about your feelings.
   - _A heavy melancholy settled over him in the weeks after his father's funeral._
   - _Her late paintings carry a gentle melancholy that critics find hard to name._
3. In the old theory of the four cardinal humors, black bile, a fluid once thought to occur in animal bodies.
   - Simple: Black bile, which people in the past believed was one of the four main fluids in the body.
   - _The physician blamed his patient's dark moods on an excess of melancholy in the body._
   - _To balance the cold, dry melancholy in her body, the doctor ordered warm food and plenty of rest._

## Origin

Greek μέλας (mélas, "black, dark") and χολή (kholḗ, "bile") were combined in Ancient Greek μελαγχολία (melankholía), which passed into Old French as melancolie and into Middle English as malencolie. Latin ātra bīlis ("black bile") is a parallel. Using the word as an adjective began in Middle English, perhaps helped by the suffixes -y and -ly, and melancholia is a doublet.

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