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lugubrious
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
lugubrious
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a lugubrious voice
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After a few minutes the door opened and a young, lugubrious face looked out.
▪ He remembered the merchant, long, lanky, and lugubrious of countenance.
▪ Henry was large and jovial and partly bald, while Jimmy was small and rather lugubrious in appearance and hailed from Glasgow.
▪ McNab's head was lowered and he seemed to be pondering in a lugubrious sort of way.
▪ People ate lugubrious meals around the waterfalls, their faces green with marine sorrow.
▪ She could imagine what was going on in the lugubrious depths of Baikal.
▪ The Rectory drive was dank and dripping between its lugubrious laurels.
▪ Their host was a huge, lugubrious man, who reminded Graham of Demis Roussos.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Lugubrious

Lugubrious \Lu*gu"bri*ous\, a. [L. lugubris, fr. lugere to mourn; cf. Gr. lygro`s sad, Skr. ruj to break.] Mournful; indicating sorrow, often ridiculously or feignedly; doleful; woful; pitiable; as, a whining tone and a lugubrious look.

Crossbones, scythes, hourglasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality.
--Hawthorne. -- Lu*gu"bri*ous*ly, adv. -- Lu*gu"bri*ous*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
lugubrious

c.1600, from Latin lugubris "mournful, pertaining to mourning," from lugere "to mourn," from PIE root *leug- "to break; to cause pain" (cognates: Greek lygros "mournful, sad," Sanskrit rujati "breaks, torments," Lettish lauzit "to break the heart"). Related: Lugubriously; lugubriousness.

Wiktionary
lugubrious

a. gloomy, mournful or dismal, especially to an exaggerated degree.

WordNet
lugubrious

adj. excessively mournful

Usage examples of "lugubrious".

He reproached himself for this, for poor Buskin rolled his eyes and twisted his mouth and pulled such lugubrious faces that Austin felt how pathetic it all was, and how hard the man was trying to work upon the feelings of the audience.

They were all hymns and ballads of a minacious description, now one and now another of which he kept repeating in lugubrious recitative.

Thus the Count was made welcome, and the very next day a lugubrious priest with an enormously long nose was instructed to lead the Count northwards to the Villa Lupighi which stood mouldering on a steep bare hill above the coast.

It was not a time for talk of any kind, either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the elevator.

Patient as a fox on a long scent in autumn, he would have kept himself lean and circumspect, until, through the help of lugubrious prayer and lantern visage, he could have beguiled into matrimony some one feminine member of the flock--not always fair--whose worldly goods would have sufficed in full atonement for all those circumspect, self-imposed restraints, which we find asually so well rewarded.

Lugg, lugubrious and sorry for himself, was sitting on the doorstep of the mill with Scatty at his side, while their captors stood round, amused and tolerant.

Kanddoyd who had not spoken now retreated, his stridulations droning on a lugubrious note.

I should think the disappearance of that long, lugubrious stiff has saved us no end of mental anguish, not to mention unremunerative labor.

He lacked the Boswellian charm, to say nothing of the genius, of the Italian, but he was in his alternately gay and lugubrious way better company than Mitford had suggested.

It was all about the Channel tunnel and a landscape awash in Eurotrash, and French fashion victims, and acid rain, and lugubrious Belgians, and Iranian language students, and lager louts swilling Heineken, and football hooligans, and holes in the ozone layer, and Italian playboys, and South American drug lords, and Swiss banks, and AmEx Goldcards, and the greenhouse effect, and the Age of Inconsequence, and soon and so forth.

It was not a time for talk of any kind, either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the elevator.

A few blows convinced Bradley that the Wieroos were arrant cowards and that they bore no weapons, for after two or three had fallen beneath his fists the others formed a circle about him, but at a safe distance and contented themselves with threatening and blustering, while those whom he had felled lay upon the pavement without trying to arise, the while they moaned and wailed in lugubrious chorus.

I will condense this account, as follows: On the 12th of August, 1861, at the hour of the close of mass, a guide arrived out of breath at the mairie of Chamonix, and bearing on his shoulders a very lugubrious burden.

He asked a lugubrious individual in a chastened sort of uniform if Sir John Phillips was in the hospital.

I wolf down salad makings, damp British biscuits a day short of mold, balls of rice as lugubrious as snot, saturated in lentil and cabbage sauce.