PATHETIC • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Pathetic

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/pəθˈɛtɪk/ Listen

adjective

Pathetic adj.

Expressing or showing anger; passionate. (Obs.)

Affecting or moving the tender emotions, esp. pity or grief; full of pathos; as, a pathetic song or story. "Pathetic action." "No theory of the passions can teach a man to be pathetic."

Pathetic muscle (Anat.), the superior oblique muscle of the eye.

Pathetic nerve (Anat.), the fourth cranial, or trochlear, nerve, which supplies the superior oblique, or pathetic, muscle of the eye.

The pathetic, a style or manner adapted to arouse the tender emotions.

See images of 'Pathetic'

Etymology of 'Pathetic'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books

... And, say, with that set, hard look in them narrow eyes, and the saggy droop to his mouth corners, he's almost pathetic. For the first time since he'd drifted across my path I didn't feel like pitchin' ...

— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... of babes cannot be determined by the needs of grown-ups. A spiritual malnutrition which starves would soon set in if adult wisdom were imposed on children for their sustenance. The truth is amply illustrated by those pathetic objects of our acquaintance, the men and women who have never ...

— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... determined not to put himself in their hands. He desired no other assurance of friendship than his brother had given him, who had already one of his daughters as a pledge, which was sufficient while she lived; "when she dieth he shall have another child of mine." And then he broke forth in pathetic eloquence: "I hold it not a brotherly part of your King, to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once; further give him to understand, that if he had no pledge at all, he should not need to distrust any injury ...

— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well own a roaster. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of Niggertown, would stoop to—Even in his thoughts Peter avoided ...

— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... thought its sympathies are more generous than those of age, because the sorrows it sees are so much greater than any it has known, ever realized in itself or even conceived. So was it now with La Mothe. The pathetic, solitary figure, feeble almost to helplessness, diseased, shrunken, dying, Commines had said, yet with a heart warm in friendliness and a thought for France alone, thrilled him to the very depths. And the dull eyes, watching him from under the heavy ...

— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

More quotes...