despondent

Etymology

From Latin despondere (“to give up, to abandon”).

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dɪˈspɒndənt/

Adjective

despondent (comparative more despondent, superlative most despondent)

1. In low spirits from loss of hope or courage.
   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., 55 Fifth Avenue, [1933], OCLC 2666860, page 0056:

     Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /deːsˈpon.dent/, [deːsˈpɔn.dɛnt]

Verb

dēspondent

1. third-person plural present active indicative of dēspondeō