Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Arousing or deserving of pity or compassion; lamentable.
- adjective Arousing disdainful pity. synonym: pathetic.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Deserving pity; worthy of or exciting compassion: applied to persons or things.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Deserving pity; wworthy of, or exciting, compassion; miserable; lamentable; piteous
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective That deserves, evokes or can be given
pity ,pitiful .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective deserving or inciting pity
- adjective inspiring mixed contempt and pity
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Austen did say the only thing that renders a single women pitiable is poverty, in Emma, I think.
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For the day came when Mulcachy rapped the chair with his whip-butt, when the attendant through the bars jabbed the iron fork into Ben Bolt's ribs, and when Ben Bolt, anything but royal, slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in pitiable terror, crawled over to the chair and sat down in it like a man.
CHAPTER XXXIII 2010
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Bolt, anything but royal, slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in pitiable terror, crawled over to the chair and sat down in it like
Chapter 33 1917
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She wrung her hands in pitiable uncertainty; then suddenly seized upon the thought that she was no longer acting in her own interest but in Raymon's; that she was going to him, not in search of happiness, but to make him happy, and that, even though she were to be accursed for all eternity, she would be sufficiently recompensed if she embellished her lover's life.
Indiana 1900
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She felt his sympathy-filled eyes soaking into her back, labeling her pitiable.
Enchanted Ivy Sarah Beth Durst 2010
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She felt his sympathy-filled eyes soaking into her back, labeling her pitiable.
Enchanted Ivy Sarah Beth Durst 2010
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She felt his sympathy-filled eyes soaking into her back, labeling her pitiable.
Enchanted Ivy Sarah Beth Durst 2010
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But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and practised a mind.
Occasional Papers Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890 1852
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She is "pitiable," guilty of "track-covering, the shame that flickers beneath the arrogance."
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Throw in the cars 'product-placement appearances on "Entourage," "The Sopranos" and "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" and you paint a picture of a brand that is becoming synonymous with a kind of pitiable narcissism, a gum-smacking, Garden State idiocy.
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