يئس

يَئِسَ • (yaʔisa) I (non-past يَيْئَسُ (yayʔasu) or يَيْئِسُ (yayʔisu), verbal noun يَأْس (yaʔs) or يَآسَة (yaʔāsa))

1. to give up hope, to despair, to be hopeless

   Synonyms: أَيِسَ (ʔayisa), قَنِطَ (qaniṭa)

   Antonyms: رَجَا (rajā), أَمَلَ (ʔamala)

   الأمل الذي يعطيه الكتاب المقدس يساعدنا أن نتحمَّل مشاكلنا ولا نيأس ― The hope given by the Bible helps us to endure our problems and not despair.

2. to become barren

• Lane, Edward William (1863) “يئس”, in Arabic-English Lexicon‎, London: Williams & Norgate
• Steingass, Francis Joseph (1884) “يئس”, in The Student's Arabic–English Dictionary‎, London: W.H. Allen

From the same root of a barren woman, to have no hope of conceiving; developing to mean just accepting that this is how things are, knowing that she cannot, to know one cannot succeed, to have no hope of anything other.

From there the sense of to stop hoping, to give up being concerned with, to abandon worrying over, to accept it to be so; a parallel semantic sense can be found in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Jewish Literary Aramaic יאּש (yaʾʾēš, “to remove desperate thoughts, to stop one's mind from thinking about”).(Can this⁽⁺⁾ etymology be sourced?)

يَئِسَ • (yaʔisa) I (non-past يَيْئَسُ (yayʔasu) or يَيْئِسُ (yayʔisu), verbal noun يَأْس (yaʔs))

1. (dialect, archaic) to know, to have certainty, to realize or to accept, to come to a realization to know a thing to be so or true
   • 609–632 CE, Qur'an, 13:31:

     أَفَلَمْ يَيْأَسِ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا أَنْ لَوْ يَشَاءُ اللَّهُ لَهَدَى النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا

     ʔafalam yayʔasi allaḏīna ʔāmanū ʔan law yašāʔu l-lahu lahadā n-nāsa jamīʕan

     ...Do not those who have trusted come to the realization that, if God caused it to be, He could certainly direct aright all people?...

• Steingass, Francis Joseph (1884) “يئس”, in The Student's Arabic–English Dictionary‎, London: W.H. Allen