deject

From Old French dejeter, from Latin deicere (“to throw down”).

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dɪˈdʒɛkt/
• Rhymes: -ɛkt

deject (third-person singular simple present dejects, present participle dejecting, simple past and past participle dejected)

1. (transitive) Make sad or dispirited.
   • 1743, Robert Drury, The Pleasant, and Surprizing Adventures of Mr. Robert Drury, during his Fifteen Years Captivity on the Island of Madagascar, London, p. 73,

     […] the Thoughts of my Friends, and native Country, and the Improbability of ever seeing them again, made me very melancholy; and dejected me to that Degree, that sometimes I could not forbear indulging my Grief in private, and bursting out into a Flood of Tears.

2. (obsolete, transitive) To cast down.
   • (Can we date this quote?) Nicholas Udall

     Christ dejected himself even unto the hells.

   • 1642, Thomas Fuller, The Holy State, Cambridge: John Williams, Book 5, Chapter 1, p. 358,

     […] sometimes she dejects her eyes in a seeming civility; and many mistake in her a cunning for a modest look.

• 1927 Harold Victor Routh: God, Man, & Epic Poetry: A Study in Comparative Literature (page 215)

  Vergil succeeds in filling Hades with all that depresses and dejects in his world, so that Aeneas encounters the causes of Augustan pessimism.

• 1933 Arthur Melville Jordan: Educational Psychology (page 60)

  On the other hand, there is nothing which dejects school children quite so much as failure.

• dejected
• dejection