Definition of "agony column" [agony column]

• A newspaper column containing advertisements chiefly about missing relatives or friends. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting - room in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was com - posed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece."
• "I had passed on to the ever-cryptic and often sinister messages of the agony column before a heavy and unpleasantly odorous body dropped beside me."