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
• Frampton, of course, had funny stories to tell, some of it in Wyman’s doleful voice.
  — Ben Crandell, sun-sentinel.com, 7 Sep. 2019
• A few hours later, what was supposed to be a night of triumph turned into a doleful evening of defeat.
  — Jeremy W. Peters and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, 10 Feb. 2016
• 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
• 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 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 doleful pessimist would also point to the rise of nationalism.
  — Akshat Rathi, Quartz, 26 Sep. 2019
• 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
• That takes its domestic haul to a doleful $17.6 million.
  — Brent Lang, Variety, 7 Nov. 2021
• 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
• 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
• The reviews have been savage, with the film languishing at a doleful 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.
  — Brent Lang, Variety, 5 Oct. 2022
• 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
• His doleful portrait can be found on T-shirts, coffee mugs and countless other knickknacks.
  — William Tipper, WSJ, 10 Feb. 2023
• That doleful scene was replicated across the region Tuesday.
  — Los Angeles Times, 7 Feb. 2023
• 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
• Freezing winter in a place designed for frolicsome summer can be a doleful time.
  — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Feb. 2022
• 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
• 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
• Those issues were mentioned fleetingly, if at all, in Trump’s doleful address.
  — Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, 4 Apr. 2023
• 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
• And with some reason: While the Eighth unfolds with doleful sweetness, his other symphonies can be chuggingly listless.
  — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 7 Nov. 2019
• Maybe so, but Lady Gaga imbues her with a doleful sincerity.
  — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 22 Nov. 2021
• The music favors doleful minor keys and skeletal harmonies.
  — Jon Pareles, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2017
• At the same time, videos of men weeping are embedded in barber chair headrests, and a life-size, near-nude statue of a doleful San Lazaro, patron of healing, presides over all, buff of physique but blemished with sores.
  — Holland Cotter, New York Times, 13 July 2023
• The song is a doleful meditation on a generation of music lovers who keep losing their heroes.
  — Andre Gee, Rolling Stone, 23 Jan. 2023
• 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
• The rescue ship pulled into port ferrying its doleful load — hundreds of men, women and children, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
  — Los Angeles Times, 19 Dec. 2021

Last Updated: 5 Oct 2024