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solitude

NOUN · English

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Experimental coverage — measured below Partial on the number of recorded words, definitions, translations, word forms and pronunciation. Treat entries as evidence to check; meanings may be incomplete.

English is Experimental in Words. Support is measured, not declared: a language reaches Partial only when every measure meets its threshold, and a measure that has not been taken does not count. The development corpus holds 60 source-backed words in English. What is shown may be incomplete, and pronunciation audio, generated forms and generated examples are not offered.

  1. Definition: Aloneness; the state of being alone, solitary, or by oneself.

    countable · uncountable

    No translation has been attempted for this sense.

    • Now the New Year reviving old Desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires, Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires. 1859, Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, page 2:
    • Cranks like Rousseau made solitude glamorous, but sensible people agreed that it was really terrible. 1975, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, →ISBN, page 193:
    • As much as I definitely enjoy solitude / I wouldn't mind perhaps / Spending little time with you 1995, “Possibly Maybe”, in Post, performed by Björk:
  2. Definition: A lonely or deserted place.

    countable · uncountable

    No translation has been attempted for this sense.

    • Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease! He makes a solitude, and calls it — peace. 1813, Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos, Canto 2, stanza 20:
    • [S]uch an one […] recalls as a vision of Paradise the land he has learnt to love; he exaggerates the insalubrity of a northern climate; he bewails the wretched formality of our civilised life, and so, back to the distant solitudes flies his recollection like a dove to the wilderness. 1874, Georg August Schweinfurth, chapter I, in Ellen E. Frewer, transl., The Heart of Africa: Three Years' Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of Central Africa, from 1868 to 1871, second edition, volume I, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, And Searle, translation of Im Herzen von Afrika, Botanical Ardour:

No paradigm has been compiled for this word yet.

Etymology: From Middle English solitude, from Old French solitude, from Latin sōlitūdō. By surface analysis, sole + -itude.

No related word is recorded for this word.