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Woebegone means looking thoroughly miserable — sadness you can see from across the room. It is a word about appearance more than about the inside feeling: a woebegone face, a woebegone little dog waiting in the rain, a woebegone expression at the bus stop. If a person is sad but hides it well, you would not call them woebegone; the word needs the drooping shoulders, the wet eyes, the whole sorry picture. Two things make it interesting. It is old and literary, so in modern English it usually arrives with a light touch — people often use it about small, non-serious sadness (a child whose ice cream fell, a friend who lost a game), and there is a gentle, half-smiling affection in it. Use it for a real tragedy and it can sound too fancy, almost like you are performing the grief instead of feeling it. It also stretches beyond people: a woebegone old house, a woebegone garden — anything that looks neglected and sorry for itself. And it is always about how something looks or seems; you say someone looked woebegone or seemed woebegone far more often than you say they were woebegone.
愁容滿面的、一臉可憐兮兮的
組成From Middle English wo-bigon: wo is woe, deep sorrow, and bigon is the past participle of an old verb bego, meaning "to come upon, to overwhelm". So woebegone is literally "beset by sorrow" — sorrow has come over you and surrounded you. The gone at the end is not the gone of go away; it is that lost verb, which is why the word looks so strange today.
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。
woebegoneadj/ˈwəʊbɪɡɒn/
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Of a person: deeply affected or overwhelmed by suffering or trouble, and so filled with woe (“great distress or sadness”); (loosely) forlorn, sad, unhappy.
- [M]ake an ende of mone, / For you are ſicke, and ſhe is woe begone.
- Thou trembleſt, and the vvhitenes in thy cheeke, / Is apter then thy tongue to tell thy arrand, / Euen ſuch a man, ſo faint, ſo ſpiritleſſe, / So dull, ſo dead in looke, ſoe vvoe begon, / Drevv Priams curtaine in the dead of night, / And vvould haue told him halfe his Troy vvas burnt: […]
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Of a person or thing: having a distressed, miserable, or sad appearance.
- Pen and Miss Bolton were hard by listening to the same concert, and the latter remarked, and Pen laughed at Mr. Foker's wo-begone face. Fanny asked what it was that made that odd-looking little man so dismal? "I think he is crossed in love!" Pen said.
- I now went down to have a look at the "port." It was the most woebegone excavation, full of mud and fishy refuse, you ever saw.
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Of a thing: in a deplorable state.
- The 44-year-old [Mikhail] Prokhorov, the second-richest man in Russia, is expected to assume control of the woebegone Nets within the next few weeks.
woebegonenoun/ˈwəʊbɪɡɒn/
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A person who is deeply affected or overwhelmed by suffering or trouble, and so filled with woe.
- Near-synonym: (chiefly US, informal) sad sack
- According to the prophecy of Mrs. [Maria] Woodworth, George Erickson and several other revivalists, who created considerable excitement in Oakland some time ago, this was the day on which San Francisco and Oakland were to be destroyed by earthquake and a tidal wave, and the cities of Chicago and Milwaukee were also to suffer the same calamity. […] All the weakminded and ‘locoed’ people in Oakland seemed to get the craze and from dark until midnight the main street was a pandemonium of salvation brass-bands, corner preachers, delirious doom sealers, and fleeing ‘woebegones’ with their torches. […] I see by despatches in The Sun that some of them have sold their property at low figures, […] but if I’m not much mistaken, the woebegones will come back and reclaim their property, […]
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。