wearisome

UK/ˈwɪəɹisəm/US/ˈwɪəɹisəm/

adjectiveB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — weary sits at #4,100neutral

Wearisome means tiring and dull to keep up with. A wearisome journey.

It is the dullness that does the tiring, which separates it from merely hard. Wearisome is slightly literary and is usually said of a task or a person's habit.

Definitions of wearisome

1adjectivewearisomeTiring and dull to keep up with.B2
“The correspondence became wearisome by the fourth letter.”

wearisome is a quality.

Where it comes from

Weary plus -some; the ending means tending to cause, as in troublesome.

Middle English
werisom
English, today
wearisome

From Middle English werisom, equivalent to weary + some.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

wearisome in the wild

Allegedly, to the exasperation of his colleagues, Walker insisted on delivering a long and wearisome "speech for Buncombe." He was shouted down by his colleagues.
Felix Walker (American politician)
Such passages, corresponding to completely subordinated compositions in painting, are apt to be wearisome if often repeated.
The Crown of Wild Olive: also Munera Pulveris; Pre-Raphaelitism; Aratra Pentelici; The Ethics of the Dust; Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing· John Ruskin

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

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