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say it: MEL-uhn-kah-lee
melancholy is a noun and adjective meaning "a feeling of thoughtful sadness". It carries 5 recorded senses.
a feeling of thoughtful sadness
a constitutional tendency to be gloomy and depressed
a humor that was once believed to be secreted by the kidneys or spleen and to cause sadness and melancholy
characterized by or causing or expressing sadness
“growing more melancholy every hour”
“her melancholic smile”
“we acquainted him with the melancholy truth”
grave or even gloomy in character
“solemn and mournful music”
“a suit of somber black”
“a somber mood”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for melancholy come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.