How to Use doleful in a Sentence

doleful

adjective
  • The girl had a doleful look on her face.
  • You sounded so doleful about your future that night.
  • As if in acknowledgement of the fact, the rhino lets out a doleful moan.
    — Henry Nicholls, Scientific American, 30 May 2012
  • No one looks like him, with his thick pompadour, sensuous, downturned lips and doleful eyes.
    — David Marchesephoto Illustration By Bráulio Amado, New York Times, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Frampton, of course, had funny stories to tell, some of it in Wyman’s doleful voice.
    — Ben Crandell, sun-sentinel.com, 7 Sep. 2019
  • Five times each day, all activity stops when a doleful call to prayer breaks through the daily commerce.
    — Pat McDonogh, The Courier-Journal, 10 Oct. 2017
  • The doleful pessimist would also point to the rise of nationalism.
    — Akshat Rathi, Quartz, 26 Sep. 2019
  • Freezing winter in a place designed for frolicsome summer can be a doleful time.
    — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Feb. 2022
  • His doleful portrait can be found on T-shirts, coffee mugs and countless other knickknacks.
    — William Tipper, WSJ, 10 Feb. 2023
  • Measles is the canary in the coal mine for vaccination and public health, and at this moment, the canary is singing a doleful tune.
    — Business Columnist, Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2026
  • Most of us who are past the age of 40 are aware from doleful personal experience that mental acuity wanes as the decades pass.
    — Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times, 30 Aug. 2017
  • The end of InSight prompted a round of doleful news coverage, with sweet praise for the little lander.
    — Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2022
  • The song is a doleful meditation on a generation of music lovers who keep losing their heroes.
    — Andre Gee, Rolling Stone, 23 Jan. 2023
  • Did Noelline find glory in being, for a short while, the talk of Naratrany, the damsel hotly contested by two doleful knights?
    — Andrea Lee, The New Yorker, 28 Dec. 2020
  • But what follows grief and mourning should not be acceptance — not a doleful shrug that the occasional terror attack is the new normal.
    — Chicago Tribune, Twin Cities, 14 June 2017
  • The repeating beat and words provided a doleful soundtrack for the encampment, where pain came from a life marked by trauma and disregard.
    — Los Angeles Times, 15 Aug. 2019
  • Add a deer’s head above a fireplace and a doleful-looking fish just because, and the woozy sensation fits right into the 2020 vibe.
    — John King, SFChronicle.com, 27 Nov. 2020
  • The reviews have been savage, with the film languishing at a doleful 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.
    — Brent Lang, Variety, 5 Oct. 2022
  • With their large hands and expressive, doleful faces, the great apes are often depicted as the poster children for experimentation.
    — Ava Kofman, New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2025
  • The production included a coyly doleful sub-Chaplin clown figure who put on a red nose now and then, but that was about as vulnerable as the show got.
    — Alastair MacAulay, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018
  • Farber set the tragedy in a bleak Scottish no man’s land, where a mournful cello underscores a doleful marital misalliance.
    — Washington Post, 6 Dec. 2021
  • Her choice of the bloom solidified the flower’s reputation as rarefied and majestic, if a little doleful.
    — Amanda Fortini Kyoko Hamada, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2023
  • The doleful voice of the late singer and poet Leonard Cohen issued from one of maybe 30 speakers piled on the instrument and arrayed about the room.
    — Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 2018
  • Morris was closemouthed about her origins, but enumerated her various conditions with a kind of doleful enjoyment.
    — Stephen King, The Atlantic, 15 May 2026
  • At the doleful close of the first movement, the double basses reached down to their sepulchral low-C extensions, a sound that didn’t exist during Mozart’s lifetime.
    — Russell Platt, The New Yorker, 3 Feb. 2017
  • Clinging to a doleful melody over a descending piano line, the Weeknd name-drops luxury cars, dismisses any competition and brags about wealth, women and drugs.
    — Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Nate Chinen and Caryn Ganz, New York Times, 23 Sep. 2016
  • For the low, low price of hours of agonizing car rides and long anxious waiting in the lobbies of veterinary clinics while doleful barks and terrified meows filter through the halls, here’s six more months.
    — S.e. Smith, Longreads, 2 Nov. 2017
  • And yet, many inside the church view these transitioners, if that’s a word, in a mournful manner, speaking of them in hushed, doleful tones, as though their faith decisions will lead them to nothing but pain and sorrow.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 23 Oct. 2022
  • Her passionate and doleful appeal was one of many made in the last few days by Ukrainian athletes after their races had ended, a far cry from their normal upbeat and buoyant mood after victory.
    — New York Times, 7 Mar. 2022
  • Its veneer of prestige television still seems forced, as the doleful soundtrack and sophisticated period design mask a lurking sense of pointlessness.
    — Matthew Gilbert, BostonGlobe.com, 7 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'doleful.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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