sorrow

noun

1. 1

   unhappiness, woe

   But sorrow that is couch'd in seeming gladness Is like that mirth fate turns to sudden sadness.

   The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

   Beijing’s bureaucrats may claim they are preventing fires, but what they are really igniting is resentment, sorrow, and resistance. The flames they lit were consuming trust, dignity, and the fragile hope that religious freedom might one day be respected in Tibet.

2. 2

   (usually in plural) An instance or cause of unhappiness.

   Parting is such sweet sorrow.

   She had nursed all the children, including Sandro, to whom she was devoted, and my husband was just as fond of her. His going away to America was a great sorrow to her, and she always kept the sacred light burning on a little altar for Sandro all the time of his long absence.

   Vaublanc, in San Domingo so sympathetic to the sorrows of labour in France, had to fly from Paris in August, 1792, to escape the wrath of the French workers.

verb

1. 1

   To feel or express grief.

   ‘Sorrow not, sir,’ says he, ‘like those without hope.’

   When, as sometimes happens, a lad dies from the effect of the operation, he is buried secretly in the forest, and his sorrowing mother is told that the monster has a pig's stomach as well as a human stomach, and that unfortunately her son slipped into the wrong stomach.

2. 2

   To feel grief over; to mourn, regret.

   It is impossible to make a man naturally blind, to conceive that he seeth not; impossible to make him desire to see, and sorrow his defect.

Forms

plural

sorrows

past tense

sorrowed

past participle

sorrowed

present participle

sorrowing

third person singular

sorrows