lugubrious
/lʊˈɡuːbrɪəs
/adjective
Looking or sounding sad and dismal: his face looked even more lugubrious than usual...
- And so my evening ended with the lugubrious sight and sound, fortunately unseen and unheard, of a chubby old poet singing along to a faltering self-accompaniment, working through a few old style songs.
- I toured the small cemetery with its sad tombstone inscriptions, and then took the short boat trip back to Ile Royale, where a lugubrious guide pointed out the almond tree under which the guillotine used to stand.
- A large, disapproving looking woman of mature years accompanied by a lugubrious Schnauzer - both clad in sleeveless knitted jerkins - had materialised on the lawn.
Synonyms
mournful, gloomy, sad, unhappy, doleful, Eeyorish, glum, melancholy, melancholic, woeful, miserable, woebegone, forlorn, despondent, dejected, depressed, long-faced, sombre, solemn, serious, sorrowful, morose, dour, mirthless, cheerless, joyless, wretched, dismal, grim, saturnine, pessimistic;
funereal, sepulchral, dirge-like, elegiac
informal down in the mouth, down in the dumps, blue
British informal looking as if one had lost a pound and found a penny
literary dolorous
Derivatives
lugubriously
/ adverb ...- He looks lugubriously over the sprawl of Northampton, coughs frighteningly and mops his brow.
- ‘You are guilty of inhumanity to your fellow man,’ the voice lugubriously intones, and nothing short of a full confession of wrongs committed to all affected will save Stu.
- For a while it became the archetypal maudlin pub drinking song: imagine it lugubriously belted out at closing time with a skinful of beer lubricating every voice.
lugubriousness
/ noun ...- But despite its lugubriousness and morbidness I left the theater going over the narrative possibilities and what they implied about the characters in a surprisingly pleasant mood.
- ‘Coming from a depressed background has paid dividends,’ he later observed with characteristic lugubriousness.
- Unfortunately, some other songs tend towards the kind of treacly lugubriousness that gives country music a bad name.
Origin
Early 17th century: from Latin lugubris (from lugere 'mourn') + -ous.