| 1 | English | plaintive | Sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic |
| 2 | Middle English | pleintif | — |
| 3 | Old French | pleintif | miserable, unhappy; complaining; plaintive; a... |
| 4 | Old French | pleindre | Alternative form of plaindre; to complain, to... |
| 5 | Latin | planctus | struck, beaten; bewailed, lamented, mourned;... |
| 6 | Latin | -tus | Forms the past participle of verbs; Forms... |
| 7 | Proto-Italic | -tus | — |
| 8 | Proto-Indo-European | -tus | Derives action nouns from verb roots |