melancholy
noun · adjective
Simple meaning
A feeling of thoughtful sadness.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
mehluhnkahleeSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈmɛlənkɑli
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A feeling of thoughtful sadness
Great sadness or depression, especially of a thoughtful or introspective nature.
adjective
literary
Affected with great sadness or depression.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A feeling of thoughtful sadness
Used this way, melancholy is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It sounds natural in ordinary conversation and in expressive writing alike.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Everyday but emotionally strong
Nearby words
- sad , a specialist term, precise but narrower
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.