different between melancholy vs atrabiliousness

English

Alternative forms

• melancholly, melancholie, melancholious (obsolete)

Etymology

From Middle English malencolie, from Old French melancolie, from Ancient Greek ?????????? (melankholía, “atrabiliousness”), from ????? (mélas), ?????- (melan-, “black, dark, murky”) + ???? (khol?, “bile”). Compare the Latin ?tra b?lis (“black bile”). The adjectival use is a Middle English innovation, perhaps influenced by the suffixes -y, -ly.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /?mel?nk?li/
• (US) IPA^(key): /?m?l.?n?k?l.i/

Noun

melancholy (countable and uncountable, plural melancholies)

1. (historical) Black bile, formerly thought to be one of the four "cardinal humours" of animal bodies.
   • , Bk.I, New York 2001, p.148:

     Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, […] is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones.

2. Great sadness or depression, especially of a thoughtful or introspective nature.
   • 1593, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, V. i. 34:

     My mind was troubled with deep melancholy.

   • 1599, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act IV, Scene 1,^[1]

     I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels; in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Translations

Adjective

melancholy (comparative more melancholy, superlative most melancholy)

1. (literary) Affected with great sadness or depression.

Synonyms

• (thoughtful sadness): melancholic
• See also Thesaurus:sad

Translations

Related terms

• melancholic
• sadness
• melancholia

English

Etymology

atrabilious +? -ness

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?æt???b?li.?sn?s/
• Hyphenation: atra?bili?ous?ness

Noun

atrabiliousness (uncountable)

1. The state or quality of being atrabilious.
   1. (medicine, obsolete) The state or quality of having an excess of black bile.
   2. Grumpiness, irritability, melancholy, moroseness.
      • 2013, Anne-Marie Millim, “‘Troops of Unrecording Friends’: Vicarious Celebrity in the Memoir”, in Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty, Anne-Marie Millim, Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson's Circle, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-137-00793-3:

        The text is 'suffused with decorous domesticity', which, [Richard] Altick has argued, is due to its rigorous omission of the 'idiosyncrasies that made [[Alfred, Lord] Tennyson] the engaging and often formidable character he was – his vanity, his atrabiliousness [and] his shaggy Lincolnshire abruptness.'

Quotations

For more quotations using this term, see Citations:atrabiliousness.

Related terms

• atrabiliary
• atrabilious
• atrabiliously