to wail: to raise a loud, howling cry of grief or dread
This is the Bible's word for full-throated wailing, the loud and drawn-out cry a person lets out in the face of ruin. It is not quiet weeping or private tears; it is a public howl of grief and dread, and the sound of the word itself imitates the cry it names.
Almost every use falls in the prophets, and almost always as a command: wail! The prophet orders a city, a nation, or a whole class of people to break into this cry because catastrophe is coming, whether an enemy army, the fall of a great trading center, or the day of the Lord itself. The wailing is the fitting response to disaster, sometimes ordered before the blow has even landed.
The cry is so bound up with total collapse that the prophets even turn it on things that cannot speak, telling the trees or the gates of a city to wail as their world is torn down. The one idea holds across every use: a loud, anguished outcry when everything is being lost.