forlorn
- desolate or dreary; unhappy or miserable, as in feeling, condition, or appearance.
- lonely and sad; forsaken.
- expressive of hopelessness; despairing: forlorn glances.
- bereft; destitute: forlorn of comfort.
Origin of forlorn
Synonyms
See more synonyms for forlorn on Thesaurus.comSynonym study
Antonyms
Examples from the Web for forlorn
Contemporary Examples
Today, a forlorn air hangs over Santa Maria degli Angeli, like a graveyard where ghosts are buried.
The roads are forlorn, the landscape barren, the forests menacing.
He could not shake the image of that forlorn, mistreated horse.
He looked as forlorn as might be expected of a retired cop who finds himself the one behind bars.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire more than 20 years ago left it, for a time, orphaned and forlorn.
Historical Examples
She had had a forlorn hope that he would throw down the sheet; but he did not.
Quaint CourtshipsVarious
These men were as forlorn and miserable as my self, death grinning in our faces at every turn.
Ned MyersJames Fenimore Cooper
Altogether, the appearance of the individual was forlorn and miserable.
The Last of the MohicansJames Fenimore Cooper
There were forlorn hollows under his eyes; now he looked twice his age.
Tiverton TalesAlice Brown
That he might be; but he was not so forlorn as to roam away and leave them together.
Little DorritCharles Dickens
forlorn
- miserable, wretched, or cheerless; desolate
- deserted; forsaken
- (postpositive foll by of) destitute; bereftforlorn of hope
- desperatethe last forlorn attempt
Word Origin
Word Origin and History for forlorn
adj.
mid-12c., forloren "disgraced, depraved," past participle of obsolete forlesan "be deprived of, lose, abandon," from Old English forleosan "to lose, abandon, let go; destroy, ruin," from for- "completely" + leosan "to lose" (see lose). In the Mercian hymns, Latin perditionis is glossed by Old English forlorenisse.
Sense of "forsaken, abandoned" is 1530s; that of "wretched, miserable" first recorded 1580s. A common Germanic compound (cf. Old Saxon farilosan, Old Frisian urliasa, Middle Dutch verliesen, Dutch verliezen, Old High German virliosan, German verlieren, Gothic fraliusan "to lose").
Commonly in forlorn hope (1570s), which is a partial translation of Dutch verloren hoop, in which hoop means "troop, band," literally "heap," and the sense of the whole phrase is of a suicide mission. The phrase is usually used incorrectly in English, and the misuse has colored the sense of forlorn. Related: Forlornly; forlornness.