Definition of "jeremiad"

"Father Maguire," he said in the broadest of Cork brogues, without the ghost of a smile on his grave Irish face, "is it a song yez wantin'? Well, thin, it's just a jeremiad I 'd be singin' yez, an' not another song at all, at all."

1895, Mary Gaunt, The Moving Finger: A Digger's Christmas

“This is precisely the manner of Balkanization that Schlesinger cautioned us about in his prescient jeremiad on multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America.”

2006 May 5, The Columbus Dispatch

Cannes is smacking its lips in anticipation of filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore's latest jeremiad against the US administration, which receives its premiere at the film festival today.

2007 May 19, Charlotte Higgins, “US government trying to seize new Michael Moore film, says producer”, in The Guardian‎

His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008.

2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker‎

What few of us realised at the time was that Osborne, while endorsing most of Jimmy’s jeremiads, also had a sneaking sympathy for his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, an upper-class relic of the Raj.

2015 March 30, Michael Billington, “Look Back in Anger: how John Osborne liberated theatrical language”, in The Guardian‎