Lament

How to spell lament

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lament

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lament mean?

1. verbTo express deep sorrow, grief, or regret about something.
2. nounA passionate expression of grief, or a song or poem of mourning.

Lament in a sentence

• verb

  Many residents lament the loss of the old library.

• noun

  The album closes with a slow lament for a lost friend.

• verb

  Economists lament the decline in household savings.

• noun

  Her speech became a lament for the town's vanished industries.

Where does lament come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin lamentum, meaning a wailing or expression of sorrow, and the related verb lamentari, which meant to weep, wail, or mourn aloud. The Latin sense was strongly tied to audible grief, the kind of crying out that accompanied funerals and disasters in the ancient world. English took the word in through French in the late 1400s and early 1500s, first chiefly as a verb for mourning and then as a noun for the grief itself or for a song or poem written in mourning. Because the spelling closely mirrors the Latin root, it is one of the more transparent borrowings, with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip up a writer. The same family gives us the slightly archaic adjective 'lamentable', meaning deserving of sorrow or regret.

How the word is built

• lament (from Latin lamentum: a wailing, weeping); no internal prefix or suffix in the modern English form