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''jeremiad'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260913121439-00-⌔

jeremiad - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

jeremiad (plural jeremiads)

  • A long speech or prose work that bitterly laments the state of society and its morals, and often contains a prophecy of its coming downfall.
    • ✤ Near-synonyms: diatribe, tirade, lamentation, lament, litany; see also Thesaurus: diatribe
    • ✤ “Father Maguire,” he said in the broadest of Cork brogues, without the ghost of a smile on his grave Irish face, “is it a song yez wantin’? Well, thin, it’s just a jeremiad I’d be singin’ yez, an’ not another song at all, at all.”1
    • ✤ According to the ‘business as usual’ school of modern historians, the millennial preoccupations of Glaber and Wulfstan hold no more significance than the jeremiads of the gullible and doom-laden who agonise in every society - the medieval equivalents of believers in UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and the X files.2
    • ✤ “This is precisely the manner of Balkanization that Schlesinger cautioned us about in his prescient jeremiad on multiculturalism, “The Disuniting of America.””3
    • ✤ Cannes is smacking its lips in anticipation of filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore’s latest jeremiad against the US administration, which receives its premiere at the film festival today.4
    • ✤ His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008.5
    • ✤ What few of us realised at the time was that Osborne, while endorsing most of Jimmy’s jeremiads, also had a sneaking sympathy for his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, an upper-class relic of the Raj.6

Etymology

From French jérémiade, from Jérémie, from Latin Ieremias, from Hebrew ירמיה (yirm’yá, “Jeremiah”). Named after biblical prophet Jeremiah, who lamented the moral state of Judah and predicted her downfall.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, US) IPA: /ˌd͡ʒɛɹ.əˈmaɪ.əd/
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -aɪəd

Printed 2026-09-13.

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Footnotes

  1. 1895, Mary Gaunt, The Moving Finger: A Digger’s Christmas: ↩

  2. 1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 187: ↩

  3. 2006 May 5, The Columbus Dispatch: ↩

  4. 2007 May 19, Charlotte Higgins, “US government trying to seize new Michael Moore film, says producer”, in The Guardian ‎, archived from the original on 9 March 2021: ↩

  5. 2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker ‎, →ISSN, archived from the original on 5 March 2019: ↩

  6. 2015 March 30, Michael Billington, “Look Back in Anger: how John Osborne liberated theatrical language”, in The Guardian ‎, archived from the original on 24 April 2022: ↩

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