 |
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Pitiful \Pit"i*ful\, adjective
1. Full of pity; tender-hearted; compassionate; kind; merciful; sympathetic.
The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. --James v. 11.
2. Piteous; lamentable; eliciting compassion.
A thing, indeed, very pitiful and horrible. --Spenser.
3. To be pitied for littleness or meanness; miserable; paltry; contemptible; despicable.
That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. --Shak.
Syn: Despicable; mean; paltry. See {Contemptible}. -- {Pit"i*ful*ly}, adverb -- {Pit"i*ful*ness}, noun
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
pitiful
adjective
1: inspiring mixed contempt and pity; "their efforts were pathetic"; "pitiable lack of character"; "pitiful exhibition of cowardice" [syn: {pathetic}, {pitiable}]
2: bad; unfortunate; "my finances were in a deplorable state"; "a lamentable decision"; "her clothes were in sad shape"; "a sorry state of affairs" [syn: {deplorable}, {distressing}, {lamentable}, {sad}, {sorry}]
3: deserving or inciting pity; "a hapless victim"; "miserable victims of war"; "the shabby room struck her as extraordinarily pathetic"- Galsworthy; "piteous appeals for help"; "pitiable homeless children"; "a pitiful fate"; "Oh, you poor thing"; "his poor distorted limbs"; "a wretched life" [syn: {hapless}, {miserable}, {misfortunate}, {pathetic}, {piteous}, {pitiable}, {poor}, {wretched}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
118 Moby Thesaurus words for "pitiful": abominable, affecting, arrant, atrocious, awful, base, beastly, beggarly, beneath contempt, beneath one, blameworthy, brutal, cheap, cheesy, common, contemptible, crummy, debasing, degrading, demeaning, deplorable, despicable, detestable, dire, disgraceful, disgusting, doleful, dreadful, egregious, enormous, fetid, filthy, flagrant, foul, fulsome, gaudy, gimcracky, grievous, gross, gutter, hateful, heartrending, heinous, horrible, horrid, humiliating, humiliative, infamous, infra dig, infra indignitatem, insignificant, lamentable, little, loathsome, lousy, mean, meretricious, miserable, monstrous, moving, nasty, nefarious, noisome, notorious, obnoxious, odious, offensive, opprobrious, outrageous, paltry, pathetic, piteous, pitiable, poor, rank, regrettable, reprehensible, repulsive, rotten, rubbishy, rueful, sad, scandalous, schlock, scrubby, scruffy, scummy, scurvy, scuzzy, shabby, shameful, shocking, shoddy, small, sordid, sorry, squalid, terrible, too bad, touching, trashy, trifling, trumpery, two-for-a-cent, two-for-a-penny, twopenny, twopenny-halfpenny, unbecoming, unclean, unimportant, unworthy of one, valueless, vile, villainous, woeful, worst, worthless, wretched
From THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993) [devils]:
PITIFUL, adjective The state of an enemy of opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
 |
Definitions retrieved from local copies of the freely distributed DICT client/server software and databases. Click here for database copyright information. - KM |