melancholy (n.)
Melancholy is a settled, quiet sadness. The word is the Greek melankholia, from melas, black, and kholē, bile.12
It began as a diagnosis. In the medicine that ran from Hippocrates through Galen and on into the eighteenth century, the body held four humours — blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile — and the mixture of them made a person’s temperament. Too much black bile made you melancholy.12
There is no black bile. The humours were abandoned and the treatments went with them, but the word outlived the physiology it was built on.12
A melancholy that lasted all winter.