Word.ws English Dictionary

poignant

Syllables: poign·antUK/ˈpɔɪ.njənt/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

obsolete/ˈpɔɪ.nənt/

poignant adjective: sharp-pointed; keen.

Adjective

poignant (comparative more poignant, superlative most poignant)

  1. (obsolete, usually) Sharp-pointed; keen.
    • His siluer shield, now idle maisterlesse; / His poynant speare, that many made to bleed [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. Neat; eloquent; applicable; relevant.
    • A poignant reply will garner more credence than hours of blown smoke.
  3. Evoking strong mental sensation, to the point of distress; emotionally moving.
    • Flipping through his high school yearbook evoked many a poignant memory of yesteryear.
    • The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray strewn with tortoise-shell hair[-]pins—he shrank from the poignant intimacy of these trifles, and from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror...1905, Edith Wharton, chapter XIV, in The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, book II, page 528
    Synonyms:
    distressing, moving
  4. (figuratively, taste) Piquant, pungent.
  5. (figuratively, word) Incisive; penetrating; piercing.
    • His comments were poignant and witty.
  6. (UK, dated) Inducing sharp physical pain.

poignant meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam

poignant in Hindi

poignant, touching, moving
मार्मिक mārmik
poignant
चरपरा carparā

poignant in Urdu

poignant
چرپرا carparā

poignant in Bengali

মর্মস্পর্শী, তীব্র আবেগময়

poignant in Malayalam

moving, touching, sad
ദയതോന്നിക്കുന്ന, ദുഖം ഉളവാക്കുന്ന, മനസ്സലിയിക്കുന്ന, മനസ്സിളക്കുന്ന, ഹൃദയസ്പൃക്കായ, കരുണമായ
More languagesFewer languages
poignant in Kannada
ನೋಯಿಸುವ, ಕನಗುವ, ಗಾಟು, ಚುರುಕಾದ

Examples of poignant in a sentence

  • A particularly poignant example of this is a child called Genie (see Curtiss 1977; Rymer 1993), who was deprived of speech input and kept locked up on her own in a room until age thirteen.2004, Andrew Radford, Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN...
  • Sad Derek attracted more than 50 comments praising him for his poignant views[…]2006 October 19, Wee Shu Min, Response to Derek Wee's blog:
  • Hanks shepherds the young girl to safety – first brusquely, and then with a sudden outburst of affection made all the more poignant for the way it is reserved previously.2021 February 9, Christina Newland, “Is Tom Hanks part of a dying breed of genuine movie stars?”, in BBC:

All 17 example sentences with poignant

Synonyms of poignant

Forms of poignant

comparativemore poignant
superlativemost poignant

Origin of poignant

From Middle English poynaunt, poynant, borrowed from Anglo-Norman puignant, poynaunt etc., present participle of poindre (“to prick”), from Latin pungō (“prick”). Doublet of pungent.

Words formed from poignant

Questions about poignant

What does poignant mean?
Poignant means sharp-pointed; keen.
What is poignant in Hindi?
Poignant in Hindi is मार्मिक (mārmik), चरपरा (carparā). See Poignant meaning in Hindi.
How do you use poignant in a sentence?
A particularly poignant example of this is a child called Genie (see Curtiss 1977; Rymer 1993), who was deprived of speech input and kept locked up on her own in a room until age thirteen.
What part of speech is poignant?
Poignant is an adjective.
How do you pronounce poignant?
Poignant is pronounced /ˈpɔɪ.njənt/ (UK).

Words near poignant in the dictionary

  1. poifect
  2. poignance
  3. poignances
  4. poignancies
  5. poignancy
  6. poignant
  7. poignantly
  8. poignard
  9. poignards
  10. poikilitic
  11. poikilitically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: poignant (page history and authors); चरपरा (Hindi) (page history and authors); چرپرا (Urdu) (page history and authors); poignant (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); poignant (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); poignant (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-poignant.ogg, en-au-poignant.ogg.

Cite this entry: “poignant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/poignant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.