Definition of "bemoan"
bemoan
verb
third-person singular simple present bemoans, present participle bemoaning, simple past and past participle bemoaned
(transitive) To moan or complain about (something).
Quotations
He’d have told that horrible sister of his that more coloureds had just turned up. How many is it now? they’d have said to each other. Fifty? Sixty? ‘You’ll have to speak to her, Cyril,’ she’d have told him, before bemoaning how respectable this street was before they came.
2004, Andrea Levy, chapter 9, in Small Island, London: Review, page 112
(transitive, reflexive) To be dismayed or worried about (someone), particularly because of their situation or what has happened to them.
Quotations
Son. Was ever son so rued a father’s death?Father. Was ever father so bemoan’d his son?
c. 1591–1592 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act II, scene v]
My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it. […] It trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom: it bemoaned him with bitter pity […]
1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter II, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume III, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], page 52
[…] So we cried to him, "O Rais, what is the matter?"; and he replied saying, "Seek ye deliverance of the Most High from the strait into which we have fallen and bemoan yourselves and take leave of one another; for know that the wind hath gotten the mastery of us and hath driven us into the uttermost of the seas of the world."
1885, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Night 563