Other forms: lamented, laments, lamenting
To lament is to express deep sorrow about something. Lament the loss, a lament for the dead, widely lamented.
It is formal and public: lamenting is grief expressed rather than felt privately. As a noun, a lament is a song or poem of mourning, and every musical tradition has them — the piper's lament is a fixed part of a Scottish funeral. It is also used of complaint: he lamented the state of the roads. Note lamentable, which means deplorable and is stressed on the first syllable.
1verblamentTo express deep sorrow about something.
“The old men lamented the loss of the village school.”
2nounsongA song or poem of mourning.
“The singer ended the evening with a slow Irish lament for those lost at sea.”
lament is an expression of grief.
laMENT → the words set like ceMENT at the grave
A slow heavy song at the grave, the words setting hard like cement, and everybody standing still in the rain until it ends.
hooks ontocement
Latin lamentum means a wailing, from a root that is probably imitative of the sound of crying. Lamentation and lamentable come from the same wailing.
Latin
lāmentor — to wail, weep
Middle French
lamenter
English, today
lament
Built from
A a back-formation from lamentation or else from Middle French lamenter and its etymon Latin lāmentor (“to wail, weep”), from lāmentum (“wailing, moaning, weeping”); with formative -mentum, from the root la-, probably ultimately imitative. Also see latrare.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA