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dismayed

Adjective
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Feeling sudden distress, fear, or alarm; used in narrative poetry to express a character's shock or loss of courage when facing bad news.

Detailed Definition
In older or literary English, dismayed often means more than just mildly worried; it suggests being shaken by fear or discouragement. Here it describes whether the soldiers were thrown off by the danger around them.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Was there a man dismayed?” (ballad-like rhetorical question); “Dismayed, the soldiers watched the dark advance” (adjectival predicate); “The child stood dismayed before the flood” (fear and surprise); “Not dismayed, she answered back” (contrastive contemporary use)
Additional Notes
The adjective in “Was there a man dismayed?” is literary and less common in everyday speech than simple words like “afraid.”; Found in the poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Also Known As
disheartened disillusioned distressed unsettled
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