How to Use lamentation in a Sentence

lamentation

noun
  • And there is hope, as well as lamentation, in its sweet, sad sound.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018
  • For Marks, the blues isn’t about lamentation.
    — Andrew Gilbert, Mercury News, 13 Apr. 2026
  • This is not to further pan for lamentations over the demise of a website.
    — Libby Watson, The New Republic, 25 Oct. 2019
  • The ghetto is full of lamentation.
    — Dr. Michael Good, Hartford Courant, 3 Feb. 2026
  • In some parts, the book did not age as well as its author, despite her lamentations about her neck.
    — Karen Heller, Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2023
  • This is a bleak model for those in lamentation over our current moment.
    — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic, 22 Jan. 2025
  • Some snapped photos of the path and its canopy of trees to share as lamentations on social media.
    — Washington Post, 5 Sep. 2017
  • But the sounds of lamentation never carry as far as those of rockets, missiles, artillery, bombs.
    — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2023
  • In Washington, there’s plenty of lamentation over what went wrong.
    — Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 12 Aug. 2022
  • His emotional arc at the end of season one put him on a path of contemplative lamentation.
    — Andy Andersen, Vulture, 8 Feb. 2024
  • There's been endless chatter and discussion and debate and lamentation around it.
    — Kate Bernot, Bon Appétit, 23 Sep. 2024
  • But something’s missing in the lamentation over the Apple buds and their erosion of social norms.
    — Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 5 June 2019
  • Their one night off from their daughter’s deathbed, the true reason for the friends’ visit, had obviously been spent in lamentation.
    — Lauren Groff, The Atlantic, 14 Jan. 2020
  • At first, there was silence, but now a great communal lamentation convulsed the assembled.
    — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2023
  • For this brief moment, every point of argument mattered, and no detail was too small for concern or lamentation.
    — Constance Grady, Vox, 16 June 2018
  • Few are likely to bemoan the absence of the long choral interludes of description or lamentation.
    — Charles Isherwood, WSJ, 28 July 2022
  • In the background one of his young children, teething and not happy about it, offered wordless lamentation for extra tension.
    — Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 19 Nov. 2020
  • These rock lamentations will not be carried over to the full-length album the band still has in the works, which Bono promises will have a more joyful tone.
    — Chris Willman, Variety, 18 Feb. 2026
  • This is a book of lamentations — the last, half-hearted clause in the subtitle stands in for a last, half-hearted chapter full of solutions.
    — Justin Davidson, Daily Intelligencer, 7 May 2017
  • The second episode of That is not still is an enactment of the practice of lamentation by one of Togar’s friends.
    — Hung Duong, Artforum, 1 Jan. 2026
  • Not until the work's third movement did Ferree's instrument step forward to sing out its own lamentation.
    — Rob Hubbard, Star Tribune, 22 Mar. 2021
  • In an impassioned speech, preceded by prayers of lamentation, Greear blamed the crisis on years of cover-ups.
    — Jay Reeves and David Crary, Houston Chronicle, 13 June 2019
  • Hughes used that lamentation to argue that this writer — of Black middle-class upbringing — wanted to be white.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Sep. 2023
  • The ululation at the beginning gives way to the spoken word feel of the rapping and a dirge-like lamentation sequence, all against the steady beat of the parai drums.
    — Siva Sithraputhran, Fortune, 29 Mar. 2021
  • Jews read from the Book of Lamentations and reflect on the work ahead to fulfill the vision of hope and promise the Torah provides.
    — Courant Community, 27 June 2017
  • Jews read from the Book of Lamentations and reflect on the work ahead to fulfill the vision of hope and promise the Torah provides.
    — Courant Community, 3 July 2017
  • Coltrane’s lamentation for four black schoolgirls killed by the Ku Klux Klan in a 1963 church bombing.
    — Bill Beuttler, BostonGlobe.com, 5 June 2018
  • Pinocchio gets turned into a tree, so a bunch of rich people … force him to sing for their entertainment, which turns into a lamentation of why people are so cruel to him.
    — Barry Levitt, Vulture, 7 Dec. 2022
  • For the first time ever after one of these corporate announcements, there was heard, mixed in with the usual lamentations, a palpable sigh of relief.
    — Danny Westneat, The Seattle Times, 8 Sep. 2017
  • Flamenco is street opera; an ecstatic mode of complaint; lamentation, some say, straight from the cavelike forges of the Romany blacksmiths.
    — James Parker, The Atlantic, 21 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lamentation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: