Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of lamenting.
  • noun A lament.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of bewailing; expression of sorrow; a mournful outcry.
  • noun plural The shorter title of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, one of the poetical books of the Old Testament.
  • noun plural The music to which the first three lessons, taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, are sung in the Roman Catholic Church, in the office called Tenebræ, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of bewailing; audible expression of sorrow; wailing; moaning.
  • noun (Script.) A book of the Old Testament attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, and taking its name from the nature of its contents.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act of lamenting.
  • noun A sorrowful cry; a lament.
  • noun Specifically, mourning.
  • noun lamentatio, (part of) a liturgical Bible text (from the book of Job) and its musical settings, usually in the plural; hence, any dirge
  • noun A group of swans.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing grief
  • noun a cry of sorrow and grief

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

recorded since 1375, from Latin lamentatio ("wailing, moaning, weeping"), from the deponent verb lāmentor, from lāmentum ("wail; wailing"), itself from a Proto-Indo-European *la- (“to shout, cry”), presumed ultimately imitative. Replaced Old English cwiþan. Lament is a 16th-century back-formation.

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