REPINE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does repine mean? 

• REPINE (verb)
  The verb REPINE has 1 sense:

1. express discontent

  Familiarity information: REPINE used as a verb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• REPINE (verb)

Present simple: I / you / we / they repine    ... he / she / it repines   
Past simple: repined   
Past participle: repined   
-ing form: repining   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Express discontent

Classified under:

Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing

Hypernyms (to "repine" is one way to...):

complain; kick; kvetch; plain; quetch; sound off (express complaints, discontent, displeasure, or unhappiness)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s

 Context examples 

She had not much time for repining, however, for the three young girls were busily employed in 'having a good time'.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I will not pause either to accuse or repine.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

“But the wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause to repine.”

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

In all this long pursuit, I never heard him repine; I never heard him say he was fatigued, or out of heart.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and rashly and ignorantly I had repined.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this talent was spread, of drawing lectures in morality, or indeed rather matter of discontent and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Mrs. Morland watched the progress of this relapse; and seeing, in her daughter's absent and dissatisfied look, the full proof of that repining spirit to which she had now begun to attribute her want of cheerfulness, hastily left the room to fetch the book in question, anxious to lose no time in attacking so dreadful a malady.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Far be it from me to repine at his doing so; he had an undoubted right to dispose of his own property as he chose, but, in consequence of it, we have been obliged to make large purchases of linen, china, &c. to supply the place of what was taken away.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

On the contrary, she was so totally unused to have her pleasure consulted, or to have anything take place at all in the way she could desire, that she was more disposed to wonder and rejoice in having carried her point so far, than to repine at the counteraction which followed.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

One ought not to repine;—but, to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me!

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)