mope

If your favorite team loses a big game, you might mope around for a few days. You feel sad and low, and you keep thinking about what went wrong. It is more than being upset for a moment. The feeling stays with you and makes you quiet, slow, and withdrawn. A child who did not get invited to a party might sit around the house like this, barely talking and not wanting to do much.

The word suggests a passive kind of sadness. You are not trying to fix the problem yet; you are just sitting with the disappointment and letting it show. It often carries a sense of self-pity or sulking. "After being rejected, she spent the entire weekend moping in her room." The word can also describe how someone looks from the outside: slumped, quiet, and clearly feeling sorry for themselves.

To mope means to sit or move around in a sad, gloomy way, usually after some disappointment, loss, or hurt feeling. A person who is moping is not just briefly upset. They stay in that low mood, keep turning the problem over in their mind, and often show it in their face, posture, and behavior. The feeling is usually quiet rather than dramatic, so the word often suggests sulking, brooding, or feeling sorry for yourself.

It is commonly used for everyday disappointments: not getting what you wanted, losing a game, being rejected, missing someone, or feeling left out. Someone might mope in their room after an argument, or mope around the house all afternoon after bad news. The idea is that they are lingering in their sadness instead of moving on quickly.

The word can sometimes sound mildly critical. If you tell someone, "Stop moping," you mean they have been sad and inactive for long enough and should get up, rejoin life, or do something useful. For that reason, mope is often used when the sadness seems real but also a bit unhelpful or drawn out. "He was still moping days after his favorite show was canceled."

Moping is usually temporary and connected to a specific cause, so it is not the same as a serious medical condition such as depression. In normal use, it describes a mood that may last for hours or days but is expected to pass. If someone seems withdrawn, gloomy, slow, and lost in unhappy thoughts, they are probably moping.