morose
/məˈrəʊs
/adjective
Sullen and ill-tempered: she was morose and silent when she got home...
- A morose mood of deep melancholy has descended upon me this afternoon.
- I got fed up with people in America thinking that my music is morose and depressing and all that.
- He became morose and silent.
Synonyms
sullen, sulky, gloomy, bad-tempered, ill-tempered, in a bad mood, dour, surly, sour, glum, moody, unsmiling, humourless, uncommunicative, taciturn, unresponsive, unsociable, scowling, glowering, ill-humoured, sombre, sober, saturnine, pessimistic, lugubrious, Eeyorish, mournful, melancholy, melancholic, doleful, miserable, dismal, depressed, dejected, despondent, downcast, unhappy, low-spirited, in low spirits, low, with a long face, blue, down, fed up, grumpy, irritable, churlish, cantankerous, crotchety, cross, crabbed, crabby, grouchy, testy, snappish, peevish, crusty, waspish
informal down in the mouth, down in the dumps
British informal narky
Northern English informal mardy
informal, dated mumpish
Derivatives
morosely
/ adverb ...- Buried under a layer of quilts he alternated between moodily staring at the paper, morosely changing channels, or just being a great big ill-tempered miserable lump.
- I said morosely and mumbling to myself more than her… ‘I'm going to be 40 this year’.
- Late in life, Wren morosely described his ultimate profession of architecture as ‘rubbish’.
moroseness
/ noun ...- The volatility and the moroseness within rise up repeatedly out of an uncontrollable inner conviction that the world stands ready to humiliate him.
- I was concerned I'd slip into a mass of moroseness, but that hasn't happened as yet.
- I've progressively grown to abhor her habitual moroseness.
Origin
Mid 16th century: from Latin morosus 'peevish', from mos, mor- 'manner'.
moral from [LMEn]:
Moral is from Latin moralis, from mos, ‘custom’, (plural) mores ‘morals’, also behind morose (mid 16th century). As a noun the word was first used to translate Moralia, the Latin title of St Gregory the Great's exposition of the Book of Job. It was subsequently applied to the works of various classical writers. In the mid 18th century the identical French word was adopted into English and an ‘e’ added to the English spelling to indicate the French stress on the second syllable, to produce morale.