What's the difference between glum and melancholy?

Glum


Definition:

  • (n.) Sullenness.
  • (a.) Moody; silent; sullen.
  • (v. i.) To look sullen; to be of a sour countenance; to be glum.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "We don't have any reason to, to be honest," he says, with a touch of glumness.
  • (2) The old, optimistic growth forecasts were torn up, replaced by the glum admission that this year the economy will have shrunk by 0.1%.
  • (3) But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.
  • (4) The AU delegation - made up of South Africa , Uganda, Mauritania, Congo-Brazzaville and Mali - left the talks looking glum, without making a public comment and to the derisive shouts of the protesters outside the hotel.
  • (5) We can see why they’re glum, but it’s not going to be a challenge for Private Eye to get a cover page joke out of it.
  • (6) They have glumly predicted precisely that outcome for some time.
  • (7) Sandwiched on a panel between the mayors of Los Angeles, Copenhagen, New York, and Johannesburg, the most rapidly converted man in the city struck out at the glums.
  • (8) (As glum centrists often observe: “He beat us twice.”) The Labour leader might not have taken his party to victory, but he has earned the right to fight again.
  • (9) Addressing a glum group of SPD supporters in Berlin, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the outgoing foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor, said it was a "bitter day for German social democracy".
  • (10) At times, Sarkozy had seemed tired and glum on the campaign trail.
  • (11) The mood in No 10 grew extremely glum as a steady drip of areas were declaring two points below their own predictions.
  • (12) I had expected the American guests to be in a state of hysteria, but apart from a few glumly watching CNN in the bar, hotel life went on as usual.
  • (13) Conventional understanding of politics assumes that that kind of rational argument is devastating: if you amass the historical data and the foreign examples, point to defeat after defeat for Corbynist programmes or Sanders-like candidates, surely their supporters will glumly lower their placards and come to their senses.
  • (14) I felt the same way I would if I went to a play and sat through an hour of about 50 actors filing onto the stage one by one and staring at me glumly in turn before any actual business resulted.
  • (15) He used to mock me for it, and see it as part of my characteristic glumness, which was such a contrast to his relentless enthusiasm.
  • (16) I can’t make decisions for myself”, she declares glumly.
  • (17) Prisoners' breath catches in clouds while they glumly circuit the courtyard.
  • (18) It’s melancholy because it rests on the glum admission that these two peoples, both asserting their right to self-determination, are unable to determine their own futures.
  • (19) Some contrasted his eloquence with Zuma, who looked glum each time his face was shown and roundly booed.
  • (20) The study's findings may be skewed by Dutch psychologists spending summers doing glum research rather than catching rays.

Melancholy


Definition:

  • (n.) Depression of spirits; a gloomy state continuing a considerable time; deep dejection; gloominess.
  • (n.) Great and continued depression of spirits, amounting to mental unsoundness; melancholia.
  • (n.) Pensive maditation; serious thoughtfulness.
  • (n.) Ill nature.
  • (a.) Depressed in spirits; dejected; gloomy dismal.
  • (a.) Producing great evil and grief; causing dejection; calamitous; afflictive; as, a melancholy event.
  • (a.) Somewhat deranged in mind; having the jugment impaired.
  • (a.) Favorable to meditation; somber.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) One radio critic described Jacobs' late night Sunday show as a "tidying-up time, a time for wistfulness, melancholy, a recognition that there were once great things and great feelings in this world.
  • (2) And melancholy is not the only thing that links Haigh’s work.
  • (3) Melancholy originally had another meaning from the present one.
  • (4) the agitated type of involutional melancholy occurred twice as often in Canada as in Hungary, the apathetic cases were rarer in Canada, and the illness began earlier among Canadian women.
  • (5) Thus New Zealand, like other countries, may be entering an age of melancholy.
  • (6) English explanations stressed religious aspects and a relationship to melancholy.
  • (7) I too was attracted to the paintings of De Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives.
  • (8) Earlier this week in Janesville, where post-industrial melancholy is evident in a closed car plant and eerily quiet downtown, House speaker Paul Ryan crushed a Trump-style challenger in a congressional primary.
  • (9) There was always a rueful melancholy, stiffened by irony and leavened by humour about him.
  • (10) Song of the summer was Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, with its odd blend of keening melancholy and positivism.
  • (11) Resorting to a series of Ted the swordsman scenes which may merely be the lurid fantasies of the heroine, director Christine Jeffs never makes it clear whether Hughes was a rampaging philanderer whose sexual conquests and general obliviousness to Plath's mounting depression led to her demise, or a man driven into other women's arms by his wife's chronic melancholy - perhaps the most time-honoured excuse of the inveterate tomcat - or both.
  • (12) "Oh, if one of Dostoevsky's novels, whose black melancholy is regarded with such indulgent admiration, were signed with the name of Goncourt, what a slating it would get all along the line."
  • (13) It's a melancholy fate for any writer to become an eponym for all that he despised, but that is what happened to George Orwell, whose memory is routinely abused in unthinking uses of the adjective "Orwellian".
  • (14) As the lead singer with the Walker Brothers, he enjoyed a number of melancholy hits with songs such as The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, My Ship Is Coming In, No Regrets.
  • (15) The leading role is infinitely variable: as Oscar Wilde said , "There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies."
  • (16) In the right light and with the right song playing on the radio, there is a certain melancholy charm to this bleak highway with its unfolding panorama of wind turbines and electricity pylons stretching to the horizon.
  • (17) On the contrary: Sørens incomparable melancholy, mental agony and anxiety (fear or anguish) forced the faith, existing independently of them, in a radical refining.
  • (18) There’s a magnificent melancholy about him, this shadowy figure performing an act of unrequited love.
  • (19) Closer is a melancholy piece but it is also laugh-out-loud funny, often, as in the very best drama, at moments of starkest pain.
  • (20) Research is needed to determine whether youth will be predisposed to further depressive episodes and, if so, will we be entering a new age of melancholy?