Home › Glossary › Letter W

wailful

Adjective
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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

Expressing sorrow through mournful crying or wailing; conveys deep grief, melancholic music, or lamenting winds in elegiac poetry.

Detailed Definition
Wailful is a rare poetic adjective meaning sorrowful or sounding like a wail. Keats uses it to give the autumn scene a faintly mournful tone as the day fades and the insects sing.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn” gives wailful to the insects’ sound, making it sorrowful and lamenting; “Wailful” intensifies ordinary crying into an atmosphere of grief; “A wailful siren crossed the sleepless blocks” transfers the adjective to modern urban sound; “The wailful wind worried the eaves” personifies weather as a mourner
Additional Notes
The adjective in the evidence is uncommon in modern usage and may prompt readers to look it up.; Found in the poem, To Autumn by John Keats
Also Known As
mournful lamenting sorrowful woeful
Skip to main content