plaintive.
Sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic.
Meaning & usage
Sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic.
a typically plaintive song from Radiohead
I can see by your plaintive smile something is wrong, so spill it.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English pleintif, plentyff, from Old French pleintif (“aggrieved, lamenting”) (whence modern French plaintif), from plainte (“lament, complaint”); see plaint. Doublet of plaintiff.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.