Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Music A funeral hymn or lament.
- n. Music A slow, mournful musical composition.
- n. A mournful or elegiac poem or other literary work.
- n. Roman Catholic Church The Office of the Dead.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A funeral hymn; the funeral service as sung; hence, a song or tune expressing grief, lamentation, and mourning.
- n. Synonyms Dirge, Requiem, Elegy, lament, threnody, coronach. The first three are primarily and almost uniformly suggested by the death of some person. A dirge or a requiem may be only music or may be a song. An elegy is a poem, which may or may not be sung. A requiem, being originally sung for the repose of the soul of a deceased person, retains a corresponding character when the music does not accompany words.
Wiktionary
- n. A mournful poem or piece of music composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A piece of music of a mournful character, to accompany funeral rites; a funeral hymn.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a song or hymn of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person
Etymologies
- From the beginning of an antiphon in the Latin requiem (Dirige, Domine, deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam) (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, an antiphon at Matins in the Office of the Dead, from Medieval Latin dīrige Domine, direct, O Lord (the opening words of the antiphon), imperative of dīrigere, to direct; see direct. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“It is from the latter of these two words that the English term dirge is derived.”
“The dirge is a lament for Aung San Suu Kii, the deposed leader of Burma who has been held under house arrest in her home in Rangoon for 17 years.”
“From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs.”
“The songs in "Deirdre," especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute passionate understanding.”
“Rightly so, Lewd Acts front-load this album with a few more like this before throwing its first genuine sonic curveball, a slow spoken word dirge called "Who Knew The West Coast Could Be So Cold?".”
“The sense I get is of Iraq as an undertone, a kind of dirge playing softly beneath the pop charts.”
“A "dirge" is a funeral or mourning song, so perhaps this is meant literally ... or, perhaps, this is a reference to some of the new”
“The muleteer, with head wrapped up in a shawl, intoned a kind of dirge, pausing sometimes to ask Allah to improve his plight.”
“She would sit for hours singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself:”
“Their voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge which is ever played along the shore for those mariners who have been lost in the deep since first it was created.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘dirge’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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GRE Barron's 800
abate, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abject, abjure, abscission, abscond, abstemious, abstinence, abysmal, accretion and 787 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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Cepstrums
to cepstrumize a word is to reverse its 1st 4 characters in the way that "cepstrum" was derived from "spectrum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepstrum...
acedy, adustion, sudation, aedility, ideality, agentive, negative, agral, argal, agrestic, ergastic, alerce and 202 more...
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GRE 2014
abase, abate, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abjure, abortive, abound, abrasive, abreast, abridge and 1577 more...
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2057 more...
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songs for the dead
various funerary productions
lament, epicedium, dirge, requiem, elegy, exequy, obsequies, epicede, Thanatopsis, trental, threnody, myriologue and 34 more...
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Words I like
A list contrived for the sole purpose of storing words I like to include in my writing; words that inspire or carry power for me.
contrite, meadow, sward, ossary, calumny, moribund, necropolis, chthonic, murmur, erstwhile, chime, beryl and 63 more...
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SAT Master Vocab List
Words I have come across that I don't know the meaning of!
rumination, contrition, extemporize, effusion, exult, vexed, sumptuous, punitive, brethren, harridan, macabre, acrid and 123 more...
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SAT words
abase, abate, abet, abject, abjure, abrogate, abscond, abstruse, accolade, accommodating, accost, accretion and 202 more...
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GRE
pejorative, austere, unconscionable, lissome, edify, winsome, axiom, malinger, abjure, deleterious, contumacious, peregrinate and 152 more...
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Words I Know
List of most of the words I've learned
garner, abase, abate, abdicate, abduct, aberration, abet, abhor, abide, abject, abjure, abnegation and 1046 more...
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Faves
nepenthe, cupidity, anodyne, obdurate, doleful, obsolescent, quale, piquant, velleity, inchoate, disport, facile and 366 more...
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1st cut
abeyance, abscission, abyss, accretion, acidulous, adulterate, adumbrate, aerie, ameliorate, anachoronistic, analgesia, anodyne and 315 more...
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My GRE
concomitant, mendacity, corollary, mandate, ascertain, exacerbate, substantiate, perennial, exemplify, hegemony, acrimonious, repertoire and 653 more...
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GRE List
anthem, ablution, apocrypha, augur, cardinal, cathedral, chant, chapel, cloister, conformist, cult, devout and 145 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for dirge.
bodhi lololol Oct 2, 2008