adjective
definition
That deserves, evokes or can be given pity; pitiful.
Examples of pitiable in a Sentence
Still more pitiable was the condition of the court.
For some time, however, after Madame du Chatelet's death he was in a state of pitiable unsettlement.
But his Taxation no Tyranny was a pitiable failure.
When taken his stockings where completely worn from his feet and he appeared to be in a very pitiable plight.
The surviving Indians were so pitiable that when the ship finally reached Hispaniola, Spanish authorities set them free.
This outdoor life, however, did not suffice to recruit Parkman's health, and by 1848, when he began writing The Conspiracy of Pontiac, he had reached a truly pitiable condition.
After the dissolution in 1538 the town sank into decay, and in 1555, on a representation of its pitiable condition, Queen Mary granted a charter establishing it as a free borough corporate with a common council consisting of a mayor, two bailiffs, twelve chief burgesses, and sixteen secondary burgesses, the mayor to be clerk of the market, coroner and a justice of the peace.
Abandoned by a number of his cardinals, condemned by most of the powers, deprived of his dominions by condottieri who shamelessly invoked the authority of the council, the pope made concession after concession, and ended on the 15th of December 1 433 by a pitiable surrender of all the points at issue in a bull, the terms of which were dictated by the fathers of Basel, that is, by declaring his bull of dissolution null and void, and recognizing that the synod had not ceased to be legitimately assembled.
And despite his self-confidence and grumpy German sarcasm he was pitiable, with his hair smoothly brushed on the temples and sticking up in tufts behind.
With the growing anarchy of the capital many of its members resigned and fled, and their places could not be filled up. Roederer himself has left in his Chronique des cinquante jours (1832) an account of the pitiable part played by the directory of the department in the critical period between the 10th of June and the 10th of August 1792.
How the Saracens, when they took him prisoner, he being half dead with a complication of diseases, kindly left him "un mien couverture d'ecarlate" which his mother had given him, and which he put over him, having made a hole therein and bound it round him with a cord; how when he came to Acre in a pitiable condition an old servant of his house presented himself, and "brought me clean white hoods and combed my hair most comfortably"; how he bought a hundred tuns of wine and served it - the best first, according to high authority - well-watered to his private soldiers, somewhat less watered to the squires, and to the knights neat, but with a suggestive phial of the weaker liquid to mix "si comme ils vouloient" - these are the details in which he seems to take greatest pleasure, and for readers six hundred years after date perhaps they are not the least interesting details.