Other forms: boredoms
Boredom is the grey heavy feeling of having nothing interesting to do. Die of boredom, relieve the boredom, sheer boredom.
It is uncountable. Psychologists distinguish it from tiredness and from unhappiness: boredom is specifically the state of wanting stimulation and not finding it. Out of boredom is a common explanation for behaviour that has no better one. Note bored, the state; boring, the cause; and that boredom is a surprisingly recent word — it appears only in the nineteenth century, in Dickens, which does not mean nobody was bored before that.
1nounboredomThe feeling of having nothing interesting to do.
“The boredom of that job was the hardest part of it.”
boredom is a state of feeling.
The word is bore plus -dom, the same ending as in kingdom and freedom, meaning a state or domain. Bore itself, in the sense of tiring somebody, appeared in the eighteenth century from an unknown source.
Old English
borian
Middle English
boren
English
bore
English, today
boredom
From bore + dom. bore comes from Middle English boren, from Old English borian. From Middle English boren, from Old English borian (“to pierce”), from Proto-West Germanic borōn, from Proto-Germanic burōną. Compare Danish bore, Norwegian Bokmål bore, Dutch boren, German bohren, Old Norse bora. Cognate with Latin forō (“to bore, to pierce”), Latin feriō (“strike, cut”) and Albanian birë (“hole”). Sense of wearying may come from a figurative use such as "to bore the ears"; compare German drillen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA