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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pessimist
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Don't be such a pessimist - I'm sure things will work out.
▪ Don't be such a pessimist - I'm sure you'll pass your driving test!
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After all, their brokers and investment bankers win business by being optimists, not pessimists.
▪ Burke is remembered as a poetic pessimist.
▪ But still, he stayed out there shovelling, confounding the pessimists even though his task was clearly hopeless.
▪ Let puritans and pessimists damn, disapprove or dismiss these appetites; that is their loss.
▪ Most accountants tend to be pessimists.
▪ Some estimates put the close of year figure at 2,050 - 150 points lower than the worst of last week's pessimists.
▪ The pessimists feared the Conservatives' nine seats could even be wiped out north of the border.
▪ With beta software, it pays to be a pessimist and not harbor unrealistic expectations.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pessimist

Pessimist \Pes"si*mist\, n. [L. pessimus worst: cf. F. pessimiste.]

  1. (Metaph.) One who advocates the doctrine of pessimism; -- opposed to optimist.

  2. One who looks on the dark side of things.

Pessimist

Pessimist \Pes"si*mist\, Pessimistic \Pes`si*mis"tic\, a. (Metaph.) Of or pertaining to pessimism; characterized by pessimism; gloomy; foreboding. ``Giving utterance to pessimistic doubt.''
--Encyc. Brit.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pessimist

1820, "one who habitually expects the worst" (Knowles' dictionary, 1835, defines it as "A universal complainer"), from 19c. French pessimiste (see pessimism).

Wiktionary
pessimist

n. Someone who habitually expects the worst outcome; one who looks on the dark side of things.

WordNet
pessimist

n. a person who expects the worst [ant: optimist]

Usage examples of "pessimist".

And when you have the optimist and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.

I hold them to be a race of pessimists, recruited amongst beggarly philosophers and knavish, atrabilious theologians.

Rehearsals had turned him into a pessimist, and, now that the actual moment of production had arrived, his nerves were in a thoroughly jumpy condition, especially as the duologue was to begin in two minutes and the obliging person who had undertaken to prompt had disappeared.

It might please pessimists to believe that England would be cowed into submission by air-raids, but the most inveterate scaremongers hesitated to assert that armies with their indispensable artillery and equipment could be dropped on British soil from the skies.

There is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities, Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist, It is that of those persons Who regard God as an old institution.

The number and appearance of the women employed is a good answer to those pessimists who maintain that the curse of the poorer Irish is the filthiness, laziness, and general slatternliness of the women.

He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, any more than one can say that the ocean is beneficient or malevolent.

On his second expedition, the co-leader had been such a confirmed pessimist that the morale of the entire party had deteriorated, causing needless disastrous incidents.

Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries.

I would have called him a pessimist, only I couldn't think of the word, and while I was trying to hit on something other than 'Gloomy Gus', which would scarcely have been a fitting way to address one of his dignity, Florence came in through the french window and he of course shimmered off.

At first I thought he was about to let loose with some horsecrap bromides about how I was being a pessimist.

Surely you can keep Treaty Controller from listening to the pessimists on Hrruba?

The optimists said that meant the Hivers were unlikely to return to that solar system again, and the pessimists wanted to know where, in that case, the sphere had gone.

But then, Keroon has experienced grave drought, and Nerat terrible torrents, and two mines in Telgar have collapsed—so the pessimists are certain that this is only the start of some tremendous calamity .

The world was divided, Landis had thought, between pessimists and optimists, those who believed that the universe's dice were loaded and those who thought that chance would just as soon throw sevens and elevens as twos or threes or twelves.