weep /wiːp/ BrE AmE verb ( past tense and past participle wept /wept/)
[ Language: Old English ; Origin: wepan ]
1 . [intransitive and transitive] formal or literary to cry, especially because you feel very sad:
James broke down and wept.
weep for
She wept for the loss of her mother.
He wept bitterly (=cried a lot) when it was time for us to leave.
REGISTER
In everyday English, people usually say cry rather than weep :
▪
She was crying all the way through the movie.
2 . I could have wept spoken used to say that you felt very disappointed about something:
I could have wept thinking what I’d missed.
3 . [intransitive] if a wound weeps, liquid comes out of it
—weep noun [singular]
• • •
COLLOCATIONS
■ adverbs
▪ openly
Some of the mourners wept openly.
▪ bitterly (=crying hard)
I heard the sound of a woman weeping bitterly.
▪ quietly/silently
He was weeping quietly, allowing the tears to run down his cheeks.
■ nouns
▪ weep tears
She wept bitter tears of self-reproach.
▪ weep buckets informal (=produce a lot of tears)
I didn’t know if she would get well, and I wept buckets every night.
■ phrases
▪ break down and weep (=start crying)
As she watched his plane taxi away, she broke down and wept.
▪ weep and wail (=cry and make loud sad noises – often used humorously)
The baby wept and wailed all the way through the ceremony.
• • •
THESAURUS
▪ cry to produce tears from your eyes:
Don’t cry – everything will be all right!
|
Men aren’t supposed to cry.
▪ cry your eyes out especially spoken to cry a lot and for a long time:
I cried my eyes out when I watched ‘Titanic’.
▪ be in tears to be crying:
By the end of his story, we were all in tears.
▪ be close to tears to be almost crying:
You could see that she was close to tears.
▪ weep literary to cry, especially for a long time:
His mother put her head on the table and wept.
▪ sob to cry, taking sudden loud breaths:
I could hear someone sobbing in the next room.
▪ wail /weɪl/ to cry very loudly in a high voice:
The baby started wailing for its mother.
▪ whimper /ˈwɪmpə $ -ər/ to cry quietly and weakly:
She began rocking to and fro, whimpering softly.
▪ hold/fight back the tears to make a big effort not to cry:
She told her story, struggling to hold back the tears.
▪ your eyes water if your eyes water, they have tears in them, for example because of smoke, wind, or when you are cutting onions:
The onions were making my eyes water.