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A quiet, gentle kind of sadness that doesn't come from one clear reason - it can just be a mood, or a feeling you get from beautiful but slightly sad things, like a rainy evening or an old song. As an adjective, 'a melancholy song' means the song carries this soft, sad feeling. It sounds a bit literary - people use it more in writing or careful speech than in everyday chat, where they'd just say 'sad' or 'down'.
憂鬱、感傷（比「難過」更文雅、更朦朧的一種悲傷）
組成From Greek melas (black) + khole (bile). Long ago, doctors thought too much 'black bile' in the body made a person sad - that old idea is where the word comes from.
同家族的字
- melaninshares melan-/melas, the Greek piece for 'black' (melanin is the dark substance in your skin)
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
melancholynoun/ˈmɛlənkəli/
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historicalBlack bile, formerly thought to be one of the four "cardinal humours" of animal bodies.
- Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, […] is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones.
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Great sadness or depression, especially of a thoughtful or introspective nature.
- My mind was troubled with deep melancholy.
- I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels; in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
melancholyadj/ˈmɛlənkəli/
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literaryAffected with great sadness or depression.
- Melancholy people don't talk much.
- […] he is melancholy without cause, and merry against the hair: […]
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Suggestive of wistfulness or subdued emotion.
- Twice a day she took them out to feed in the marshy places, let them waddle and gobble for an hour or two, and then drove them back and shut them up in a small dark shed to digest their meal, whence they gave forth occasionally a melancholy quack.
- It was the same old song / With a melancholy sound.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。