Word of the Day

: August 7, 2023

malaise

noun muh-LAYZ

What It Means

Malaise refers to a slight or general feeling of not being healthy or happy.

// She couldn’t pinpoint the cause of this overwhelming feeling of malaise.

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malaise in Context

“Despite its less-than-satisfying ending, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse serves the coolest animated kids I’ve seen since Miles felt that first bite from a radioactive spider five years ago. The movie opens with an all-girl, multiracial garage band coping with Gwen Stacy’s (Hailee Steinfeld) malaise and ends with a team as powerful as rock stars ready to save the world.” — Eisa Nefertari Ulen, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 June 2023

Did You Know?

A recipe: combine a handful of the blahs, a pinch of the blues, and maybe a soupçon of ennui, season generously with “under the weather,” and voila, you’ve got yourself the stew of sinking sensations known as malaise. Malaise, whose Old French ancestor was formed from the combination of mal (“bad”) and aise (“comfort”), has been a part of English since the mid-18th century. It originally referred to a vague feeling of weakness or discomfort accompanying the onset of an illness—a meaning still in use today when a virus or other malady starts producing symptoms—but has since broadened to cover a general, ominous sense of mental or moral ill-being.