bemoan
Americanverb (used with object)
-
to express distress or grief over; lament.
to bemoan one's fate.
-
to regard with regret or disapproval.
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
bemoansimple
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bemoanssimple
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have bemoanedperfect
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has bemoanedperfect
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am bemoaningprogressive
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are bemoaningprogressive
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is bemoaningprogressive
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have been bemoaningperfect progressive
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has been bemoaningperfect progressive
Past
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bemoanedsimple
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had bemoanedperfect
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was bemoaningprogressive
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were bemoaningprogressive
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had been bemoaningperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of bemoan
before 1000; be- + moan; replacing bemene, Middle English bimenen, Old English bimǣnan ( bi- be- + mǣnan to moan)
Explanation
Some people love to complain, don't they? Complainers also tend to bemoan things, which can be translated to "Oh no! Why me?" A more casual expression for bemoan is to moan and groan. If you step in a puddle and get your shoes wet, you might moan and groan about, or bemoan, your bad luck to whoever will listen. Just about any bad or annoying thing can be bemoaned. In fact, people love to bemoan how much other people are moaning and groaning about things!
Vocabulary lists containing bemoan
100 SAT Words Beginning with "B"
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Beowulf vocabulary
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Many professors bemoan cheating but tend to do little about it, often claiming that students who cheat only harm themselves by not really learning the material.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 25, 2026
Today, however, we come not to bemoan the bad times but celebrate the good times, for the Angels and Dodgers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026
He is not the type to bemoan his lot publicly.
From BBC ● Aug. 27, 2025
And in several anonymized survey responses shared exclusively with Salon, parents didn’t bemoan their offspring as being anything close to lazy or entitled.
From Salon ● Apr. 9, 2025
He’d bemoan coming to this horrible, beautiful forest at all.
From "The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest" by Aubrey Hartman
Like many chefs, he bemoans National Insurance rises and increasing business rates, but also more local problems like limited car parking and unclean streets, which put off diners.
From BBC ● Feb. 13, 2026
Wall Street bemoans Mamdani’s win, Trump threatens Jay Powell again, and the Bezos-Sanchez wedding is flashy and splashy.
From Slate ● Jun. 28, 2025
Brinkley bemoans the present colonization of the fashion space by digital media.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 29, 2025
She bemoans that she had to pay for her interpreter to manage treatment.
From Salon ● Jan. 22, 2025
He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans.
From The Aeneid English by Virgil
For anyone who cares about video games as art and has bemoaned the ever-tightening corporate stranglehold over visual entertainment and its archives, Sony’s disc phaseout is an earth-shattering quake that’s not to be taken lightly.
From Slate ● Jul. 7, 2026
Ten kilometres away, Edzel Baylon, a staffer at the Isla Jardin del Mar resort, bemoaned a newly changed landscape that spelled trouble for a destination that touted a white sand beach holiday experience.
From Barron's ● Jun. 19, 2026
Retiree Pattie Oliphant bemoaned the “sad state of affairs” for Carney, his family and the office of mayor.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026
Newcastle won their Monday night meeting at Elland Road 12 days later, after which Keegan bemoaned Ferguson's comments about Leeds' players and a "man like Stuart Pearce".
From BBC ● Apr. 13, 2026
She bemoaned her fate and challenged her stars as we hung our laundry or scrubbed scales from our fish.
From "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
Mark Joseph Stern: The speech is ostensibly bemoaning the progressive movement of the early 20th century, but the New Republic’s Matt Ford has a fantastic piece about how his history is completely wrong.
From Slate ● Apr. 17, 2026
"The Olympics only happen every four years and only a very few times in a career," he said, bemoaning the lack of "Olympic atmosphere" in Bormio.
From Barron's ● Feb. 5, 2026
Chip makers and cloud-computing purveyors have described the demand for their offerings as effectively limitless, with heads of the AI model companies bemoaning capacity constraints and tussling over chip allotments.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 12, 2025
In contrast, 2nd XI bowlers were put to the sword, with coach Peter Sainsbury bemoaning the cost of balls to replace those Smith had smashed out of the ground.
From BBC ● Dec. 2, 2025
The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn’t hear many Sherpas bemoaning the changes.
From "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
