Lamented

How to spell lamented

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce lamented

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lamented mean?

1. verbExpressed grief, sorrow, or regret about something in the past.
2. adjectiveMourned or deeply missed, especially after a death.

Lamented in a sentence

• verb

  She lamented the loss of her childhood home for years afterward.

• adjective

  The much lamented founder was remembered at the annual ceremony.

• verb

  The editor lamented the decline in careful proofreading.

• adjective

  His late lamented wife had built the family business from nothing.

Where does lamented come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb lament comes from the Latin lamentari, meaning 'to wail, mourn, or cry out in grief', which was built on the noun lamentum, a loud wailing or expression of sorrow. The word is thought to be partly imitative, echoing the sound of a mournful cry. It travelled into English in the early 1500s by way of the French lamenter, and from the start it carried the sense of openly mourning a death or a serious loss. The participle 'lamented' soon settled into a fixed polite phrase, as in 'the late lamented', describing someone whose death is widely mourned. Because the word keeps just a single l and a single m around a plain root, the spelling is comparatively gentle, and the only real wobble is whether the middle vowel feels like an 'a' or a softer schwa.

How the word is built

• lament (from Latin lamentum: a wailing or cry of grief)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)