dismal [ME] This word originally referred to 24 days, two in each month, that medieval people believed to be unlucky. The name derives from Latin dies mali ‘evil days’, and first appeared in English in the early Middle Ages as the dismal. This was quickly spelled out more clearly as the dismal days. Soon dismal days could be any time of disaster, gloom, or depression, or the time of old age, and a person could be described as dismal by the early 16th century. In 1849 the Scottish historian and political philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) nicknamed the difficult subject of economics (then known as ‘political economy’) the dismal science.