Noun: tragedy
| Singular | tragedy |
| Plural | tragedies |
Sample Sentences
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“The story of this adoption is, of course, the pivot round which all the circumstances of the mysterious tragedy revolved. Mrs. Yule had an only son, namely, William, to whom she was passionately attached; but, like many a fond mother, she had the desire of mapping out that son's future entirely according to her own ideas.[…]” [1904–1905, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], “The Tragedy in Dartmoor Terrace”, in The Case of Miss Elliott, London: T[homas] Fisher Unwin, published 1905, →OCLC; republished as popular edition, London: Greening & Co., 1909, OCLC 11192831, quoted in The Case of Miss Elliott (ebook no. 2000141h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg of Australia, February 2020:]
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We saw a farmhouse burning down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And we rolled right past that tragedy 'till we turned into some road house lights. [1976, “Coyote”, in Hejira, performed by Joni Mitchell:]
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[…] last month's flooding in the Buffalo Creek Valley […]. The tragedy took more than one hundred lives[…] [2015 August 25, Julia Keller, Last Ragged Breath: A Novel, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 153:]
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After the terrible tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, which killed 146 New York garment workers, proper fire drilling was considered a necessity. [2015, Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims: The Damages of Dress Past and Present, →ISBN, page 142:]
Nouns inflected like tragedy
clitoridectomy,
royal jelly,
whoopsy,
surrogacy,
urinary,
rastrography,
renoscopy,
sourtop blueberry,
forcible entry,
superficiary,
lipidosity,
potability,
phonography,
hyperproperty,
greenery,
conjugality,
ring singularity,
Brittany,
ignobility,
obscurity, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From the Middle English tragedie, from the Old French tragedie, from the Latin tragoedia, from the Ancient Greek τραγῳδία (tragōidía, “epic play, tragedy”), from τράγος (trágos, “male goat”) + ᾠδή (ōidḗ, “song”), possibly a reference to the goat-satyrs of the theatrical plays of the Dorians, or according to Beekes possibly to a goat given as prize, though the etymology remains uncertain. See: Middle English Nouns '
tragedie', Latin Nouns '
tragoedia', Ancient Greek Nouns '
τραγῳδία'.