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loneliness

Nil-the-Frogg

Senior Member
Français (France)
Hello ladies and gentlemen 👁 Smile :)


I've checked a few dictionaries about this word and definitions always seem to mention sadness. Is it just because sadness is generally associated with the fact of being alone or is the word "loneliness" really related to sadness? Should I then use "solitude" or something else to refer to "pleasant loneliness"?
Hello Sir. Well yes, loneliness is implicitly sad; you need solitude otherwise. (I can't think of anything else.)
Oh yes, I'd say aloneness is a word, Asr, but it means something slightly different:
While the party-goers frolicked all around him in groups of three or four, Nil-the-Frogg stood out because of his aloneness.
Thank you Ewie!

hmm guess I'm kinda slow today; so there it means...Nil-the-Frogg stood out because he was ?
"All alone" means isolated or on one's own (the "all" intensifies the meaning), but I think a certain amount of sympathy is expressed by it. Note that it is not hyphenated.

I think lonely and loneliness did not originally have a sadness element to them, or at least not necessarily. The OED lists separate entries for the "neutral" and "sad" meanings of the words lonely and loneliness. However, I think in modern English it's very hard not to imply sadness by using these words.

Solitude is much more easily seen as "neutral", or even as a desirable state.
He is a lonely man --> implies that he is sad (because he is lonely), that his non-sad behavior is a direct product of his inner sadness. For example, a child asks his mom, "Why is Mr. McDonald so mean to all the kids?" Mom replies, "Oh don't worry about him. He's just a lonely old man." It means he's only mean because he's actually very sad inside. The word lonely always has (to me) a very depressing sound to it.
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