despair
Other forms: despairing; despaired; despairs
Despair is the feeling of not having any hope left. If you completely forgot to study for your final exam in math, you might feel despair when your teacher passes out the test.
Despair can also refer to someone or something that causes you to worry or be sad. Unfortunately, some children are the despair of their parents. The verb despair means to lose hope. Despair is from Latin desperare "to be without hope," from the prefix de- "without" plus sperare "to hope," from spes "hope."
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a state in which all hope is lost or absent“in the depths of despair”“they were rescued from despair at the last minute”synonyms: desperation
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the feeling that everything is wrong and nothing will turn out well“they moaned in despair and dismay”“one harsh word would send her into the depths of despair”antonyms:hopethe general feeling that some desire will be fulfilledtypes:hopelessnessthe despair you feel when you have abandoned hope of comfort or successpessimismthe feeling that things will turn out badlydefeatismacceptance of the inevitability of defeatintimidationthe feeling of discouragement in the face of someone's superior fame or wealth or status etc.cynicisma cynical feeling of distrusttype of:feelingthe experiencing of affective and emotional states
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abandon hope; give up hope; lose heart
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Vocabulary lists containing despair
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
A boy named Salva struggles to survive after being separated from his family in war-torn Sudan. A girl named Nya spends hours each day collecting water for her parents and sister. Their lives eventually intersect in this novel based on a true story.
On the New SAT, all of the Reading Test questions are multiple choice and are based on reading passages that may be taken from literature, science, the social sciences, or a US founding document (or a text inspired by such a document). Many of the reading comprehension questions meant to assess a student’s understanding of those passages will require students to choose words that best describe the writer’s tone or point of view, words like the 200 words you see on this list. Learn them here so when you see them in an SAT answer choice, you’ll know what they mean! Here are all of our word lists to help you prepare for the new SAT (debuting March of 2016): The Language of the Test, Multiple-Meaning Words, and Words to Capture Tone.