Melancholy

How to spell melancholy

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce melancholy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does melancholy mean?

1. nounA lingering feeling of pensive sadness, often with no obvious cause.
2. adjectiveHaving or expressing a thoughtful, gloomy sadness.

Melancholy in a sentence

• noun

  A quiet melancholy settled over her after the holidays ended.

• adjective

  He gave a melancholy smile as he packed away the old photographs.

• noun

  The empty office filled him with a strange melancholy on his last day.

• adjective

  The grey afternoon light made the abandoned house look melancholy.

Where does melancholy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the ancient Greek melankholia, a medical term built from melas, meaning 'black', and khole, meaning 'bile'. In the old theory of the four humours, an excess of black bile in the body was believed to cause a settled gloom and low spirits, so the name of the supposed fluid became the name of the mood itself. The word travelled through Latin as melancholia and into Old French as melancolie before settling into English in the 1300s. The unexpected 'ch' in the middle, pronounced like a hard k, is the fingerprint of that Greek khole root, and it is exactly the spot where modern writers stumble. Knowing that 'chol' literally means 'bile' (the same root sits inside 'cholera' and 'cholesterol') makes the awkward spelling far easier to anchor in memory.

How the word is built

• melan- (from Greek melas: black)
• chol (from khole: bile)
• -y (noun/adjective suffix)