Is there any difference in meaning between the adjectives melancholy and melancholic? Can they be used interchangeably?
The Oxford Learner's Dictionaries define them as follows:
very sad or making you feel sadness
SYNONYM mournful, sombre
- melancholy thoughts/memories
- The melancholy song died away.
(old-fashioned or literary)
feeling or expressing sadness,
especially when the sadness is like an illness
Best Answer
Long ago, melancholy was a noun, and only melancholic an adjective.
In recent centuries, melancholy has taken on an adjectival sense meaning having a feeling of the noun melancholy.
Back in 1713, Alexander Pope wrote in his rather lengthily titled
the following sentence, in which the word is clearly used adjectivally:
Pope is there using the adverb verb to modify melancholy, which makes it an adjective not an attributive noun.
Would it have made any difference if he had used melancholic there? No, not really.
However, and for whatever reason I cannot say, the use of very melancholy has plummeted over the past two centuries, per this ngram: