A feeling of pensive, often prolonged sadness or gloom, frequently without an identifiable cause..
A feeling of pensive, often prolonged sadness or gloom, frequently without an identifiable cause.
Unlike plain sadness, melancholy connotes a reflective, lingering, sometimes pleasurable gloom. More habitual and dispositional than acute grief, and without the clinical specificity of “depression.”
From Greek melankholia, literally “(excess of) black bile” (melas “black” + khole “bile”).
c. 1300, from Old French melancolie, from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek melankholia — rooted in the four-humors theory of medicine.
Began as a humoral/medical term (a disorder caused by black bile), broadened to “sorrow, gloom” by the mid-14th c., and as humoral physiology was abandoned in the 1700s narrowed to a general “gloomy state of mind.” No reliable evidence of a distinct recent-generation shift.