How to Use lamentation in a Sentence

lamentation

noun
  • And there is hope, as well as lamentation, in its sweet, sad sound.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018
  • This is not to further pan for lamentations over the demise of a website.
    Libby Watson, The New Republic, 25 Oct. 2019
  • In the scrap for lamentation, everyone wants to be top dog.
    Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2018
  • Jews read from the Book of Lamentations and reflect on the work ahead to fulfill the vision of hope and promise the Torah provides.
    Courant Community, 3 July 2017
  • Some snapped photos of the path and its canopy of trees to share as lamentations on social media.
    Washington Post, 5 Sep. 2017
  • Coltrane’s lamentation for four black schoolgirls killed by the Ku Klux Klan in a 1963 church bombing.
    Bill Beuttler, BostonGlobe.com, 5 June 2018
  • In some parts, the book did not age as well as its author, despite her lamentations about her neck.
    Karen Heller, Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2023
  • The ululation at the beginning gives way to the spoken word feel of the rapping and a dirge-like lamentation sequence, all against the steady beat of the parai drums.
    Siva Sithraputhran, Fortune, 29 Mar. 2021
  • But something’s missing in the lamentation over the Apple buds and their erosion of social norms.
    Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 5 June 2019
  • The voice: a low, guttural rasp, it’s the aural equivalent of slithering, the wheezy lamentation of a leprechaun long past his sell-by date.
    Henry Alford, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2022
  • The epic ends with a trio of women’s voices—those of Hector’s wife, his mother, and Helen of Troy—lifted in lamentation.
    Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker, 18 Oct. 2021
  • This is a book of lamentations — the last, half-hearted clause in the subtitle stands in for a last, half-hearted chapter full of solutions.
    Justin Davidson, Daily Intelligencer, 7 May 2017
  • Their one night off from their daughter’s deathbed, the true reason for the friends’ visit, had obviously been spent in lamentation.
    Lauren Groff, The Atlantic, 14 Jan. 2020
  • And these lamentations about disrespect of the FBI and the intelligence services should stop.
    Conrad Black, National Review, 6 Feb. 2018
  • Peak lamentation came from Mosul’s older diaspora, some of whom had left Iraq in the 1970s.
    Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 20 July 2017
  • In an impassioned speech, preceded by prayers of lamentation, Greear blamed the crisis on years of cover-ups.
    Jay Reeves and David Crary, Houston Chronicle, 13 June 2019
  • And when Ophelia (a mostly very sane-seeming Sheila Vand) goes mad, her lamentations are also in Persian.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 22 May 2017
  • In Washington, there’s plenty of lamentation over what went wrong.
    Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 12 Aug. 2022
  • Early on Shaw’s enunciation lacked crispness, and grimaces plus gestures did not make up for the lamentation that was more in the words than the tone quality of the voice.
    Alan Artner, chicagotribune.com, 9 Mar. 2018
  • Few are likely to bemoan the absence of the long choral interludes of description or lamentation.
    Charles Isherwood, WSJ, 28 July 2022
  • In keeping with the conceit established in the intro, the album ends with the theme of repentance and redemption like the closing verse of Lamentations.
    Irvin Weathersby, Esquire, 20 Apr. 2017
  • In the background one of his young children, teething and not happy about it, offered wordless lamentation for extra tension.
    Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 19 Nov. 2020
  • Their lamentations were also a coded attack on ultra-leftist zealots who were circling the ailing Mao, now that Zhou was gone.
    The Economist, 24 Oct. 2019
  • Not until the work's third movement did Ferree's instrument step forward to sing out its own lamentation.
    Rob Hubbard, Star Tribune, 22 Mar. 2021
  • Gray holds court with a nebbishy, self-mocking churn of anecdote and lamentation, and his humor, in the outer-borough Ashkenazi style, can leave one unsure where the shtick ends and the real self-loathing starts.
    Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2019
  • Flamenco is street opera; an ecstatic mode of complaint; lamentation, some say, straight from the cavelike forges of the Romany blacksmiths.
    James Parker, The Atlantic, 21 Dec. 2019
  • Hughes used that lamentation to argue that this writer — of Black middle-class upbringing — wanted to be white.
    Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Sep. 2023
  • At the very least, the book is timely, particularly in its lamentation of the hatefulness — the word is not too strong — of the nation's political divide.
    Leonard Pitts, Alaska Dispatch News, 9 Aug. 2017
  • Pinocchio gets turned into a tree, so a bunch of rich people … force him to sing for their entertainment, which turns into a lamentation of why people are so cruel to him.
    Barry Levitt, Vulture, 7 Dec. 2022
  • The Demon has the prince killed on the way to the wedding, and the entire second act is a lengthy party scene, its celebrations cut short by the news of the bridegroom’s demise, and then extended with repetitive lamentations.
    Heidi Waleson, WSJ, 31 July 2018

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

Last Updated: