Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Spiritual torpor and apathy; ennui.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An abnormal mental condition, characterized by carelessness, listlessness, fatigue, and want of interest in affairs.
- n. A Cuban name for a species of tongue-fish or sole, Symphurus plagusia.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue (personified as one of the deadly sins).
WordNet 3.0
- n. apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue (personified as one of the deadly sins)
Etymologies
- Late Latin, from Greek akēdeia, indifference : a-, a-; see a-1 + kēdos, care. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Cassian himself dwells on the horrible liability of the monks to the principal vices which infest human nature — gluttony, uncleanness, avarice, anger, vainglory, pride — above all, that despairing and unaccountable melancholy which they call acedia, and describe as “the demon that walketh in the noonday.””
“I returned to my old way of life, out of desperation, loneliness, isolation, I was supposedly a hermit and what is called 'acedia' - something many people today think is the 'dark night' - it's not.”
“And as the subtitle promises the themes it will explore are the intersections of acedia with the writer's marriage -- especially with her husband's illness and death; with monks, who come in both because Norris first encountered the term acedia in the writings of the desert fathers and because she's a Benedictine oblate and thus has found that participating in the monastic life as a lay person has been for her a primary means of combating acedia; and the writing life, both Norris and her late husband are published poets.”
“Simple boredom is the sort you suffer from during long Christmas dinners or political speeches; "existential" boredom is more complex and persistent, taking in many conditions, such as melancholia, depression, world weariness and what the psalmist called the "destruction that wasteth at noonday"—or spiritual despair, often referred to as acedia or accidie.”
“People do feel helpless, but I believe that sense is itself a sign of something spiritually deadly: what the Fathers and Doctors of the Church called acedia or the deadly sin of "sloth.”
“The ancient word acedia, which in Greek simply means the absence or lack of care, has proved anything but simple when it comes to finding adequate expression in English.”
“I wrote my book because I suspected that although the word "acedia" is unfamiliar to most of us, its effects are widely known.”
“Rather than titillate or horrify, MTV's Skins elicits a certain acedia -- a lingering spiritual listlessness or torpor that the ancients counted among the Seven Deadly Sins.”
The Huffington Post: Cathleen Falsani: MTV's Skins: Suffer The Little Children
“Still, when talk turns toward carbon footprints and global warming, lately a certain melancholy -- almost a vague acedia -- has begun to shadow my heart.”
The Huffington Post: Cathleen Falsani: God Is Green: Why 'Less Bad' Is Not Good
“She concludes that the worst that acedia can do to us is not only make us unable to care, but also take away our ability to feel bad about that.”
The Huffington Post: Rev. Amy Ziettlow: Battling Christmas Crankiness
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘acedia’.
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Rare Words - A
Not just rare words, but thousands of RARE WORDS WITH DEFINITIONS.
If you want to see the definitions, too, go to
http://phrontistery.i...aba, abacinate, abactor, abaculus, abaft, abampere, abapical, abarticular, abasement, abasia, abask, abatis and 1214 more...
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11250 more...
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Russian Doll Words
A Russian Doll word is a word that, when you remove the first and last letters, is either the empty string, or a Russian Doll word. These are all of the 6 or more letter Russian Doll words found in...
waspiness, upraisers, strainers, sporangia, raspiness, prelatess, methanals, gaspiness, washings, uprisers, upraises, upraiser and 2373 more...
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phrontistery - a
from phrontistery.info
aba, abacinate, abactor, abaculus, abaft, abampere, abapical, abarticular, abasement, abasia, abask, abatis and 1214 more...
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Chelsea's list
acedia, braggadocio, abnegation, equanimity, flibbertigibbet, edentulous, debonair, hypnotic, pococurante, logorrhea, euonym, feckless and 23 more...
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phonetically speaking
they just sound nice
veranda, sequoia, boudoir, plinth, sinews, abeyance, engastrimyth, circumlocution, acedia, cadaver, ether
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Serendipity's Words
defenestration, mercurial, syzygy, wicked, iniquitous, metastable, demimonde, entropic, ephemeral, irreligious, frisbee, manifold and 474 more...
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kalidas's Words
crepuscular, mellifluous, ephemeral, diaphanous, zeitgeist, geisterfahrer, infinite, eternal, idyllic, azure, reminiscent, oblivion and 521 more...
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new words!
errata, corrigenda, lacuna, inculcate, chiaroscuro, temerity, folderol, juggernaut, diadem, alacrity, exegesis, portmanteau and 97 more...
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Words to Try to Use in Colloquial Spe...
surquedry, equivocate, putative, turgid, congeries, irrefragable, quiddity, zaftig, flagitious, bloviate, perfidy, compendious and 227 more...
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timrmortiss's list
compotation, deodand, lignify, obstreperous, noetic, promantia, nostrum, cynosure, sesquipedalian, callipygian, inchoate, hortatory and 93 more...
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ADW2
nudnik, temper, intercalate, cleave, scowl, chapfallen, malapropos, disport, annals, paean, paradisiacal, whet and 362 more...
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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The Collection
A somewhat discriminatory list of words and phrases collected for their euphonic or arcane appeal, interesting etymology, or concise definition of an otherwise unnamed phenomenon or concept.
ziggurat, neophilia, sucker punch, soporific, epoch, tundra, fiat, idiotproof, miscellany, metaphysics, cryptozoology, dysphoria and 856 more...
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Encountered while reading
snatiation, urodynamics, cadaverine, putrescine, ferret emesis, dracula fish, psychedelic frogfish, mangkorn chomphoo, sengi, blonde-ginger bat, symplectic camel, zeolite and 312 more...
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the omnibus
preponderance, idioglossia, acumen, heteronym, flux, anacoluthon, metonymy, impetus, constellation, exegesis, revelatory, cloistered and 877 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for acedia.

chained_bear "Melancholy, as it was called until the twentieth century, is of course a very ancient problem, and was described in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates. Chaucer's fourteenth-century characters were aware of it, and late medieval churchmen knew it as acedia, which was technically a sin, since it often led to the neglect of religious obligations."
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 133
Gee, just what a depressed person needs: to be told that being depressed is a sin. Mar 13, 2009
troopie 1. Apathy; a lack of care or interest; indifference
2. Spiritual or mental sloth;
3. boredom
Acedia is a Latin word, from Greek akedia, literally meaning "absence of caring".
May 7, 2008