dispiteous
English
Etymology
Variant of despiteous, later reanalysed as dis- + piteous.
Adjective
dispiteous (comparative more dispiteous, superlative most dispiteous)
- (archaic, literary) Not showing mercy or pity.
- c. 1460s John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Ihon Hardyng in Metre, London: Richard Grafton, 1543, “Rychard the third,”[1]
- […] these .ii. noble princes [wer] by treyterous tiranny taken & depriued of their estate, shortly shut vp in prison & priuely slain & murderd by ye cruell ambicion of their vnnaturall vncle & dispiteous tourmentours […]
- c. 1596 William Shakespeare, King John, Act IV, Scene 1,[2]
- How now, foolish rheum!
- Turning dispiteous torture out of door!
- I must be brief, lest resolution drop
- Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.
- 1851, Thomas Smibert, “The Wallace Wight” in Io Anche! Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, Edinburgh: James Hogg, p. 56,[3]
- O England! when the Wallace Wight was led,
- A fettered wonder, to thy capital,
- How cruel, how dispiteous was his fall!
- 1911, Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, New York: John Lane, 1912, Chapter 16, p. 252,[4]
- “The unerring owls have hooted. The dispiteous and humorous gods have spoken. […] ”
- 1997, Gretel Ehrlich, Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist, Boston: Beacon Press, Chapter 3, pp. 72-73,[5]
- As we began our descent from the mountains, the image of Yi villages threaded together only by footpaths stayed in my mind. Not that they hadn’t been affected by the dispiteous anarchism of the Cultural Revolution, but they lived in relative isolation.
- c. 1460s John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Ihon Hardyng in Metre, London: Richard Grafton, 1543, “Rychard the third,”[1]