dolour

Etymology

From Middle English dolour (“physical pain, agony, suffering; painful disease; anguish, grief, misery, sorrow; grieving for sins, contrition; hardship, misery, trouble; cause of grief or suffering, affliction”) [and other forms], from Anglo-Norman dolour, Old French dolour, dolor, dulur (“pain”) (modern French douleur (“pain; distress”)), from Latin dolor (“ache, hurt, pain; anguish, grief, sorrow; anger, indignation, resentment”), from doleō (“to hurt, suffer physical pain; to deplore, grieve, lament”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *delh₁- (“to divide, split”)) + -or (suffix forming third-declension masculine abstract nouns). The English word is a doublet of dol.

noun

1. (chiefly uncountable, literary) Anguish, grief, misery, or sorrow.
2. (countable, economics, ethics) In economics and utilitarianism: a unit of pain used to theoretically weigh people's outcomes.
   Supposedly, utilitarians are able to add and subtract hedons (units of pleasure) and dolors (units of pain) without any signs of cognitive or affective distress […] 1986, Rosemarie Tong, Ethics in Policy Analysis (Occupational Ethics Series), Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, page 16