plaint

From Middle English plainte, borrowed from Anglo-Norman plainte (“lamentation”), plaint (“lament”), and Old French pleinte (“lamentation”), pleint (“lament”) (modern French plainte), from Medieval Latin plancta (“plaint”), from Latin planctus (“a beating of the breast in lamentation, beating, lamentation”), from Latin plango (“I beat the breast, I lament”); see plain.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /pleɪnt/
• Rhymes: -eɪnt

plaint (plural plaints)

1. (poetic or archaic) A lament or woeful cry.
   • 1827, Maria Elizabeth Budden, Nina, An Icelandic Tale, page 11:

     In the first paroxysm of his grief, Ingolfr exclaimed, (what sorrowing heart has not echoed his plaint?) that he could never more taste of joy.

   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, Chapter V, p. 75,

     His shriek was as feeble as the plaint of a grass-stalk in a storm.

2. A complaint.
   • 1897, Henry James, What Maisie Knew:

     she seemed to repeat, though with perceptible resignation, her plaint of a moment before. ‘Your father, darling, is a very odd person indeed.’

3. (archaic) A sad song.
4. (archaic or Britain law) An accusation.

   Once the plaint had been made there was nothing that could be done to revoke it.

• complaint
• plaintiff
• plaintive

• plaint in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• plaint in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

• Taplin, platin, pliant

From Middle French plaint, pleint, from Old French plaint, pleint, from Latin planctus.

plaint m (feminine singular plainte, masculine plural plaints, feminine plural plaintes)

1. past participle of plaindre

• plainte

• pilant, pliant