mirth

mirth, glee, jollity, hilarity are comparable when they mean the mood or temper of a person or a group of persons manifesting joy or high spirits especially in laughter, play, or merrymaking.

Mirth often implies lightness of heart and a love of gaiety; it may, however, imply great amusement or cause for laughter

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Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness overflows in mirth— Austen

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some of them literally throwing themselves down on the ground in convulsions of unholy mirth— Kipling

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they seem to quiver on the edge of mirth, as if some deep continual laughter was repressed— Hallam Tennyson

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Glee is often employed in reference to an individual who by reason of special circumstances is filled with joy, delight, or happiness, and shows his exultancy by laughter, smiles, and cries of joy

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full well they laughed, with counterfeited glee, at all his jokes, for many a joke had he— Goldsmith

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the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians from succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of power— Huxley

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But glee may express the exultation of one who takes more or less malicious delight in another's misfortunes or predicaments

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in great glee over his friend's embarrassment

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with malicious glee they quoted a previous boast of the President's— F. L. Allen

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it betrayed the glee felt by the mean-spirited when they see people who do not deserve humiliation forced to suffer it— West

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Jollity, on the other hand, usually implies mirth in a group, especially a merrymaking group. Distinctively, however, it connotes exuberance and lack of constraint and may imply revelry of any kind

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midnight shout and revelry, tipsy dance and jollity— Milton

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contributed more than his share of the jollity by turning out puns by the hamperful— Balliett

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Hilarity fundamentally implies the exhilaration of spirits (as by wine, pleasurable excitement, or great amusement)

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wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity, but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment— Johnson

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through all the works of Chaucer, there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity— Coleridge

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but it often carries implications of boisterousness or exuberance

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he entered wholeheartedly into the hilarity of the boys, till he too was talking only nonsense— Rolvaag

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the hilarity of a New Year's Eve celebration

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Analogous words: cheerfulness or cheer, lightheartedness, joyfulness, gladness, happiness (see corresponding adjectives at GLAD): joy, *pleasure, delight: merriment, blitheness, jocundity, joviality (see corresponding adjectives at MERRY)

Contrasted words: *sadness, depression, dejection, melancholy, blues, dumps: *tedium, boredom, ennui