Despair

How to spell despair

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce despair

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does despair mean?

1. nounA complete loss or absence of hope.
2. verbTo lose or give up hope, especially about a particular outcome.

Despair in a sentence

• noun

  A feeling of despair settled over the team after the third rejection.

• verb

  The doctors urged the family not to despair before the test results arrived.

• noun

  The mounting debts filled her with quiet despair.

• verb

  She began to despair of ever finishing the report on time.

Where does despair come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb desperare, meaning 'to be without hope', formed from the prefix de-, here carrying the sense of 'away from' or 'without', and sperare, meaning 'to hope', which itself comes from the noun spes, meaning 'hope'. The Latin word passed into Old French as desperer, and English adopted it in the 1300s, first as a verb and soon afterwards as a noun. The same Latin root for hope survives in the borrowed word 'desperate' and in 'desperado', so the underlying idea of having lost all hope runs through the whole family. The spelling trap lies in that quiet middle: the 'des-' beginning and the '-pair' ending, where the 'air' sound is written with the letters 'a', 'i', 'r' rather than the more obvious 'are' or 'ear'. Keeping the Latin 'sper' (hope) in mind helps explain why the second syllable is spelled the way it is.

How the word is built

• de- (away, without)
• spair (from Latin sperare: to hope)