melancholic

melancholic adj Melancholic, melancholy, atrabilious, hypochondriac are comparable when they mean gloomy or depressed, especially as a manifestation of one's temperament or state of health. Melancholic and melancholy are often used interchangeably without additional implications or suggestions

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the drawings Thurber has produced . . . calling into being an ineradicable population of fierce-looking women, furtive men, and gently melancholic dogs— Newsweek

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the Cape Colored, a gentle and melancholy people— N. Y. Times

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although each can be used discriminatingly to suggest the differences inherent in their related nouns (see melancholia and melancholy under SADNESS).

In such use melancholic describes a person who is afflicted with or inclined to melancholia

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those recurring moods of melancholic suspicion which had so tortured me . . . remained absent and she seemed on the road to recovery— Ellis

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Melancholy, on the other hand, describes a person, or the mood, disposition, acts, or utterances of a persoñ, who is excessively sad or detached in spirit and, usually, averse to what is cheerful or gay

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"They say you are a melancholy fellow." "I am so; I do love it better than laughing"— Shak.

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a changed smile flickered like sunlight over the melancholy countenance— Wylie

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there is no merriment . . . comparable to that of melancholy people escaping from the dark region in which it is their custom to keep themselves imprisoned— Hawthorne

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Atrabilious preserves the implication of an unhealthy physical condition more strongly than the preceding words; often in modern use it suggests the morose or choleric disposition of the dyspeptic or the predilection for gloom of those who have been subjected to severe strain

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neither were those plump rosy-gilled Englishmen that came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilious, earnest- eyed race— J. R. Lowell

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that the American genius was foredoomed to fail was the atrabilious Ames's firm conviction— Brooks

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Hypochondriac comes close to atrabil-ious in its suggestion of constitutional gloominess but it implies also an unwholesome anxiety about one's state of health

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she was rather hypochondriac and was gloating over the tale of her symptoms— Edmund Wilson

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the culture just had gone hypochondriac, and all members of the society, whatever their congenital individual dispositions, had fear and pessimism pounded into them from childhood on— Kroeber

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Analogous words: *despondent, despairing, hopeless, forlorn, desperate: pessimistic, misanthropic, *cynical, misogynic