In the realm of human emotions, few expressions are as raw and evocative as the act of crying. Tears, like shimmering dewdrops, cascade down our cheeks, revealing a profound depth of feeling within. From the gentle trickle of sadness to the torrent of overwhelming grief, crying encapsulates a myriad of emotions that words alone often struggle to convey. In an endeavor to capture the essence of this powerful expression, let us embark on a journey through the realm of emotions, exploring 50 adjectives that aptly describe the many facets of the cry.
- Sorrowful – expressing deep sadness or grief
- Emotional – characterized by strong feelings or sentiment
- Tearful – shedding tears or inclined to weep
- Heartbroken – overwhelmed by intense sadness or despair
- Distraught – deeply agitated or troubled
- Bereft – feeling deprived or lacking something
- Desolate – feeling abandoned or alone
- Anguished – experiencing severe mental or emotional pain
- Wretched – deeply miserable or unhappy
- Devastated – completely shattered or destroyed
- Pained – suffering or experiencing distress
- Grieving – mourning over a loss or tragedy
- Mournful – filled with sorrow or lamentation
- Agonized – tormented or in extreme pain
- Depressed – feeling low in spirits or utterly dejected
- Melancholic – characterized by a profound sadness or gloom
- Regretful – expressing or feeling remorse or disappointment
- Desperate – feeling hopeless or in dire need
- Overwhelmed – overcome by a strong emotion or situation
- Crushed – deeply saddened or defeated
- Fragile – delicate or easily broken, emotionally vulnerable
- Shattered – completely broken or destroyed
- Defeated – overcome by adversity or loss
- Resigned – accepting of a difficult or painful situation
- Miserable – extremely unhappy or wretched
- Grief-stricken – filled with intense sorrow or grief
- Tormented – suffering from mental or emotional anguish
- Weary – feeling exhausted or worn out, emotionally drained
- Despondent – in a state of deep despair or hopelessness
- Forlorn – abandoned or lonely, feeling forsaken
- Anguish-ridden – filled with extreme distress or torment
- Gloomy – characterized by a dark or dismal atmosphere
- Agitated – feeling restless or disturbed
- Heartrending – intensely distressing or emotionally painful
- Unbearable – too painful or distressing to endure
- Mournful – filled with grief or sorrow
- Tortured – experiencing intense mental or emotional anguish
- Lamentable – deserving of grief or regret
- Remorseful – filled with deep regret or guilt
- Desperate – feeling a sense of urgency or despair
- Sullen – gloomy or sulky in mood
- Anguished – in severe physical or emotional pain
- Angsty – feeling anxious or filled with inner turmoil
- Devastated – overwhelmed by shock or sadness
- Depressed – feeling profound sadness or melancholy
- Grievous – causing great sorrow or grief
- Crestfallen – feeling utterly disappointed or defeated
- Hurtful – causing emotional pain or distress
- Wailing – crying out loudly and uncontrollably
- Mourning – expressing grief or lamentation over a loss
I heard several loud cries of pain, and, as my sight became accustomed to the dark, I discovered that the creatures had left the window.
As he spoke the words there came a startling little cry from Miss Tredworth accompanied by the crash and clatter of falling crockery.
Now in a while they heard a sound, faint and confused: a hum, that presently grew to a murmurto a droneto a low wailing of voices, pierced of a sudden by a shrill cry no man‘s lips could utter, that swelled high upon the air and died, lost amid the growing clamour.
I cried again with a sharp and bitter cry; and the echo seemed to come back and back from every side, No love!
The little Pilgrim wept for happiness to hear her brother‘s voice; but in the midst of it her ear was caught by another sound,a faint cry which tingled up from the darkness like a note of a muffled bell,and she turned from the joy and the light, and flung out her arms and her little voice towards him who was stumbling upon the dark mountains.
He pointed his own pistol at the figure, there were three simultaneous reports, and the oncoming figure fell with a hoarse cry of pain.
But as Beltane went, pondering the jester‘s saying, the drowsy stillness was shivered by a sudden, loud cry, followed thereafter by a clamour of fierce shouting; therefore Beltane paused and turning, beheld the jester himself who ran very fleetly, yet with three lusty fellows in close pursuit.
But you that have trudged over more roads than any muleteer that plies for hire, you must have come across the people of Lyons, and you must know that it is a far cry from Xanthus to the Rhone.“
“ The little Pilgrim at this clasped her hands with a piteous cry.
Then there rose in the stillness a great and exceeding bitter cry, ‘God!‘
Suddenly, from the stern rail, there went up the startled cry: “Man overboard!“
Came fearful cries from aboard the enemy.
“ Perfect silence on the upper floor; only the solemn shadows of the night, as the moon rises higher and higher, and the plaintive cries of the night–birds alone betoken life.
When we believed him to be really gone we started up bemoaning our horrible fate, until the hall echoed with our despairing cries.
With a half–stifled cry he shrank back.
“Letters!“ was the joyful cry.
The pitiful cry began again.
“ I could feel her trembling now, and would have bent and kissed her, but that she sprang from me with a little frightened cry, and I turned to see her mother standing in the hall below.
Astolfo drove them with his horse towards the sources of the river Nile, in the Mountains of the Moon, and pursued them with the hippogriff till they entered a great cavern, which, by the dreadful cries and lamentings that issued from the depths within it, the Paladin discovered to be the entrance from earth to Hell.
And at last he settled back in the snow and turned his head straight up to the spruce–tops, and the wolf came out of him in a long mournful cry which quivered through the still night for miles.
Would I?“ burst out Lenore, with a passionate little cry.
One was wrinkled and hoary; the inexpressible loveliness of the other, who might have seen seventeen or eighteen summers, extorted a universal cry of admiration, followed by a hush of enraptured silence.
Thereafter he turned upon the three, but even as he did so, Walkyn uttered a fierce cry, and whirling about with axe aloft, sprang into the green, whence of a sudden rose a babel of voices, and the sound of fierce blows and, thereafter, the noise of pursuit.
I looked, and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he read he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?“
Mary said, with an involuntary cry of dismay.
And, even as I knew Sir Benedict, in that same moment he knew me, and gave a joyous cry and came and fell upon his knee and kissed my hand, as of old.
Yon doleful cry is not the note of the swallow on the carved rafters, nor the song of the variegated bird upon the blossoming tree.
“ The four had practiced the melancholy cry of the owl, as heard in the Southern woods both day and night, and they could all imitate it sufficiently well to pass muster if the hearer were not on guard against the trick, and yet so clever an imitation that none of the four could mistake it.
And what she felt when she heard the child‘s feeble cries, that wail, that first effort of a human‘s voice!
I rushed to and fro like one distracted, uttering cries of despair, and when from the shore I saw the vessel under full sail just disappearing upon the horizon, I wished bitterly enough that I had been content to stay at home in safety.
At a given signal, the curtain was withdrawn, and the creature reached out his trunk over the head of Fabricius with a harsh and terrible cry.
He saw a dark, wide, and barren shingle of the world, a desert of desolation made by man, where strange, windy shrieks and thundering booms and awful cries went up in the night, and where drifting palls of smoke made starless sky, and bursts of reddish fires made hell.
At times, angry cries smote the air, and they would be answered by multitudinous gruntings.
It was a bleak dawn, full of a thick, low–lying mist beyond the walls, but within this mist, to north and south and east and west, was a faint stir, while, ever and anon, rose the distant cry of some sentinel within Duke Ivo‘s sleeping camp, a mighty camp whose unseen powers held the fair city in deadly grip.
(the peculiar cry of Alpine herdsmen).
It was followed by a muffled cry, a crash, and a heavy fall.
And when the princes and captains of the Assyrians heard this, anon they rent their clothes, and intolerable dread fell on them, and were sore troubled in their wits and made a horrible cry in their tents.
You‘re not going away, I hope, Max?“ This last almost frantic cry was caused by a movement on the part of the one on whom poor Steve‘s hopes most depended.
That hole must be stopped until he had drifted near enough to give vent to an agonizing cry for help.
He looks where Jack had been and sees him lying on the ground, stifling an agonized cry by holding his left arm over his mouth.
Touch that solemn looking old croaker on yonder broad leaf of that pond lily, with the end of your fishing rod, while the music is at the highest, he will send forth a quick discordant and cracked cry, like that of a greedy dog choked with a bone, as he plunges for the bottom; and note how suddenly that sound will be repeated, and how quick the roar of the frogs will be hushed into silence.
And above that sound there rose the voice of Sandy McTrigger in a weird and terrible cry.
Old wives, that scarce could with their crutches creep, And little babes, that newly learn’d to speak, Men masterless, that thorough want did weep, All in one voice, with a confused cry, In execrations bann’d you bitterly: Plague follow plague, they cry: he hath undone The good Lord Robert, Earl of Huntington.
But they did not hear again that lonely cry from the Sun Rock.
The while her dark soft eyes sought all the earth, The beauteous earth that she too soon must leave; And all her mournful murmurs ended thus With this sad cry of, “Oh, the happy world!“ Ended with these low words as a sigh, I will obey, but, “oh, the happy world!“
Such nurses as have not the hardihood to dose their infant charges, are often full of other schemes to still that constant and reproachful cry.
Poor Martin could do nothing but gaze up at the little he could see of the sky in that close, black place, until his neck ached with the strain; but at last, to make him hope, he heard a soundthe now familiar long shrill cry of the wild man.
Furious, metallic cries from the Pretty Lily woke them, in the blue twilight.
As we tore through the tangled dense green patair, the broad leaves crackled like crashing branches, the huge elephants surged ahead like ships rocking in a gale of wind, and the mahouts and attendants on the pad elephants, shouted and urged on their shuffling animals, by excited cries and resounding whacks.
This we did, and the sails were hoisted, but before we had made any way the rocs reached their despoiled nest and hovered about it, uttering frightful cries when they discovered the mangled remains of their young one.
Then came the thrilling cry: “Fire!
As we tore through the tangled dense green patair, the broad leaves crackled like crashing branches, the huge elephants surged ahead like ships rocking in a gale of wind, and the mahouts and attendants on the pad elephants, shouted and urged on their shuffling animals, by excited cries and resounding whacks.
And with increasing knowledge came increasing tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo–milk.
This we did, and the sails were hoisted, but before we had made any way the rocs reached their despoiled nest and hovered about it, uttering frightful cries when they discovered the mangled remains of their young one.
I heard a man‘s exultant voice cry, ‘There!
With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar.
The doggs have hunted well this dewy morning, And made a merry cry.
Almost as far as eye can reach I see the close–reefed vessels fly, As fast we flit along the beach, One little sandpiper and I. I watch him as he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Or flash of fluttering drapery.
But the slight cry of dismay had come from Miss Tredworth.
I uttered a triumphant cry, which was responded to by the colonel, and which the abyss re–echoed with a hollow sound, as if it felt that its prey had escaped from it.
He had heard her voice; when that death–grip was tightest about his throat there had come to him that terrified cry: “Mon Dieu, you are killing himkilling him!“ His breath came a little faster as he whispered the words to himself.
“Be thou our leader henceforth!“ and thereto they besought him with eager cries and with hands outstretched.
And when his pursuer dragged his body to the surface, he gave a mighty cry, for, lo!
But suddenly there came the noise of a wild confusion and uproar in the streets of the village, a shrieking and wailing of women‘s voices, a clangor of brazen trumpets and a clashing of swords, and a desperate cry: “The soldiers!
The night–bird answered back with dismal cry, Like to a wounded man about to die
With inarticulate bestial cries she fell upon the man who had killed Billy, and her violet fripperies fluttered, her impotent little hands beat at him, tore at him.
It was scarcely five minutes, before the voices of the dogs broke upon the stillness of the morning, in a simultaneous and fierce cry, as if they had started the game suddenly, and fresh from his lair.
How the sumac banners bent, dripping as if with blood, What a mournful presence brooded upon the slumbrous air; A mocking–bird screamed noisily in the depths of the silent wood, And in my heart was crying the raven of despair, Thrilling my being through with its desolate, desolate cry “It were better to die, it were better to die.
A little before sunset, on the second day of the gale, the appalling cry of “Breakers ahead!“ was raised.
There never was a more foolish cry.
During the night, many of the tribes send forth a continual cry, to keep themselves together; although one would think that the noise which must accompany their flight would be sufficient for that purpose.
“If you could bemy wife, dearie?“ She uttered a low, distressful cry, and, gliding swiftly into her room, for the first time in her young life turned the key between them.
He continued there a few moments longer, and was about to follow them, when a prolonged and piercing cry smote his ear; and, looking in the direction of the sound, he perceived a figure running with great swiftness towards the pit.
For though few may follow and join with us to–day, yet to–morrow and every day in the future, and every year, as the mass–peoples come into their own, and to the knowledge of what they are and what they desire to be, those numbers will increase, till the cry itself is no longer a mere cry but an accomplished fact.
As he spoke the words there came a startling little cry from Miss Tredworth accompanied by the crash and clatter of falling crockery.
“If you could bemy wife, dearie?“ She uttered a low, distressful cry, and, gliding swiftly into her room, for the first time in her young life turned the key between them.
She entered with a strange, hysterical cry: ‘Carlotta!‘ I had asked her long ago to use my Christian namelong before I ever imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I always called her Mrs. Ispenlove.
He continued there a few moments longer, and was about to follow them, when a prolonged and piercing cry smote his ear; and, looking in the direction of the sound, he perceived a figure running with great swiftness towards the pit.
The man resolved, and steady to his trust, Inflexible to ill, and obstinately just, May the rude rabble‘s insolence despise, Their senseless clamours and tumultuous cries; The tyrant‘s fierceness he beguiles, And the stern brow, and the harsh voice defies,
As he spoke the words there came a startling little cry from Miss Tredworth accompanied by the crash and clatter of falling crockery.
For though few may follow and join with us to–day, yet to–morrow and every day in the future, and every year, as the mass–peoples come into their own, and to the knowledge of what they are and what they desire to be, those numbers will increase, till the cry itself is no longer a mere cry but an accomplished fact.
They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children.
These changes in the character of the scene, which in some respects began to take the aspect of omens, were uneasily witnessed by all in the stern of the bark, though the careless laughter, the rude joke, and the noisy cries, which from time to time arose on the forecastle, sufficiently showed that the careless spirits it held were still indulging in the coarse enjoyments most suited to their habits.
If some staunch hound, with his authentic voice, Avow the recent trail, the justling tribe Attend his call, then with one mutual cry, The welcome news confirm, and echoing hills Repeat the pleasing tale.
This is no healthy sleep that wraps her now, Else would she waken at my anxious cry; ‘Tis death–sleep, wretched man.
They kept guard during the night, and did all they could to keep us awake by their eternal cry of “Alleya,“ which means, “Be off,“ or “Keep your distance!“
“He must have been most horribly surprised, for he uttered a gasping cry as he spun round, and instead of keeping his feet and rushing at me as I expected he went down with a thud by the window.
There was a little galloping of hooves, not long sustained; an occasional sharp cry of command or sharper oath; an intermittent rumble and jar from the infrequently moved artillery, not yet in action; and perhaps a groan or two from the wounded.
He had been very willing to leave the burden of this painful inquiry to the man who had no personal feelings to contend with; but at this indignant cry he started forward, and, with an air of fatherly persuasion, remarked kindly: “You mustn’t mind the official tone, or the official persistence.
Desperately he fought and struggled, but mighty though he was, his captors were mighty also, moreover his bonds galled him; wherefore, fighting yet, they dragged him to the tree, and to the tree Beltane fast bound him, whiles the forest rang and echoed with his panting cries until his great voice cracked and broke, and he hung ‘gainst the tree, spent and breathless.
“Partisans and leaders, aiming at the overthrow of our institutions, may, while temporarily in high places, by fraud and usurpation, keep up the false cry of rebel and traitor; but these irrepressible outburstings of popular sentiment, regarding no restraints on great–occasions which cause Nature to speak, show clearly how this cry and charge are regarded and looked upon by the masses of the people everywhere.
His crashing, thunderous roar of pain smothered instantly the reechoing report of the rifle and stifled the instinctive cry that had come to Ben‘s lips.
He did not seem to like the disturbance at all, but kept flying from branch to branch in the vicinity, repeatedly uttering his guttural cries.
I have wondered as I have observed the housewives lingering at their windowsfor my window also looks upon the parkI have wondered that these melodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares of wider sale.
But when Cinna assailed the memory of the dictator, the crowd broke out into menacing cries, and the liberators again retired to the Capitol.
O, mother, mother, how could you?“ The hopeless cry went to her mother‘s heart.
Austria, who masses her armies on our frontiers and threatens to invade our country because liberty and order rule there; because concord and affection between sovereign and peopleand not forcesway the State; because there the anguished cry of oppressed Italy is listened toAustria dares to tell us, who are armed only in our own defence, to lay down those arms and put ourselves in her power.
For hours the gun detachments were at work with drag ropes, lowering, guiding and hauling, and the monotonous cry, that every Siege Gunner knows so well, “On the ropestogetherheave!“
in a moment I did wake, and the Maid in the same instant of time; and there was a great screaming and crying out in the night, that surely affrighted us both; yet did hurt our hearts the more; for it did be the utter cryings and terror of poor humans in the night of that Land.
“ The last thing he had remarked, before Carmel‘s unearthly cry had sent the horrified guests in disorder from the house, was the presence of Dr. Perry in a small room which Sweetwater had supposed empty, until the astonishing events I have endeavoured to describe brought its occupant to the door.