sorry [OE] In the Anglo-Saxon period to be sorry was to be pained or distressed, full of grief or sorrow [OE]—the meaning gradually weakened to become ‘sad through sympathy with someone else’s misfortune’, ‘full of regret’, and then simply an expression of apology by the mid 19th century. The source was sore [OE], which originally had the meaning ‘causing intense *pain, grievous’. Sorrow is also Old English. The expression more in sorrow than in anger is taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When Hamlet asks Horatio to describe the expression on the face of his father’s ghost, Horatio replies, ‘a countenance more in sorrow than in anger’.