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Definition
the feeling of being bored by something tedious- She's suffering mid-life ennui with evaporating hopes.
- We're living together until ennui do us part.
- They were only a week married, and here was George already suffering ennui, and eager for others' societyThackeray, William Makepeace -- Vanity Fair
- I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui.Edgar Allan Poe -- The Purloined Letter
- Ennui is the mortal enemy of prisoners; I had ennui, and I amused myself with twisting that rope.Dumas, Alexandre -- The Three Musketeers
- He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope.Wilde, Oscar -- The Picture Of Dorian Gray
- Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.Thoreau, Henry David -- Walden & on the Duty of Civil Disobedience
- He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye.Crane, Stephen -- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
- The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam.Conrad, Joseph -- The Mirror of the Sea
- Quel ennui d'ecrire quelquechose que l'on ne comprend pasBronte, Charlotte -- The Professor
- As well as to weakness and exhaustion, does he appeal to too much strength, to superabundant vitality, to the ennui of idleness.London, Jack -- John Barleycorn
- It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui.Chopin, Kate -- The Awakening and Selected Short Stories
- and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from ennui; inertia overcame me.Dostoyevsky, Fyodor -- Notes from the Underground
- Ennui was a word of which I have forgotten the meaning.Oppenheim, E. Phillips -- The Yellow Crayon
- I see coming an age of sexual catastrophe—a violent increase of bondage, increased violence and guilt, increased disgust and ennui.John Gardner -- The Sunlight Dialogues
- You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite .... or out of ennui.Frank Herbert -- Dune
- He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye.Stephen Crane -- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
- Something I must do, or ennui will rain upon me in buckets.David McCullough -- John Adams
- His initial reaction is one of ennui: there is a ritual dance to be gone through, and it is one that bores him.Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace
- It's my ennui—"It's just, yeah, no other way to get around it.Robert MacNeil and William Crane -- Do You Speak American?
ennui = the feeling of being bored by something tedious