Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use plaintive in a sentence

12 example sentences · adjective

Plaintive means sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic. Example: “I can see by your plaintive smile something is wrong, so spill it.”

Examples of plaintive by meaning

adjectiveSounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic.

  • a typically plaintive song from Radiohead
  • I can see by your plaintive smile something is wrong, so spill it.
  • When my wife and I heard a plaintive whinny from our laundry room the other day, we knew that our old dryer had cycled its last load.2026 January 16, Danny Heitman, “An empty nester’s ode to the cycles of laundry – and life”, in The Christian Science Monitor

More sentences with plaintive

  • The koha is an early bird, and its call is strident, plaintive, and easy to imitate.2006, Swarna Wickremeratne, “Festival of New Beginnings: The New Year”, in Buddha in Sri Lanka: Remembered Yesterdays, Albany, N.Y.: State…. From the entry koha
  • A tentative violoncello is playing, invisible and plaintive, then stops with an asthmatic scrape of catgut.2002, Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, Canongate Books (2010), page 110. From the entry violoncello
  • One instrument is plaintive, grievesome, high pitched: a little boy's whine.1989, Ira Sadoff, Emotional Traffic. From the entry grievesome
  • The landlady asked with plaintive apologeticness if they could make a shade less noise.1930, William Babington Maxwell, To what green altar?. From the entry apologeticness
  • Available in the lobby!” (monstrous, plaintive moaning) “That's it.2017 September 4, Jeff Kauffmann, “The Talented Mr. Dingleberry” (17:28 from the start), in American Dad!, season 14, episode 21, spoken…. From the entry poultice
  • Elaine, which I once found too plaintive.1988, Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, page 278. From the entry elaine
  • The rugburn became increasingly inflamed, and, through trembling lips, which were pursed as if to whistle, my cure began singing its sublime, plaintive painsong.2021, Adam Levin, Bubblegum, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 9. From the entry rugburn
  • As such industrial fields remain largely mum, the air is now filled with the plaintive voices of the industries suffering from the drastic upwing of the yen.1986, Tokyo Business Today, page 64. From the entry upwing
  • She cried out, and Fina brought the butt 'round again, and this time the bone must have pierced the brain because the body went limp with a final, plaintive gurgle.2023 October 12, HarryBlank, “Fire in the Hole”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 22 May 2024. From the entry go south

Meaning of plaintive

  1. adjective Sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic.

Full definition of plaintive

Questions about plaintive in a sentence

How do you use plaintive in a sentence?
Plaintive is used as an adjective. For example: “I can see by your plaintive smile something is wrong, so spill it.”
What is a short sentence with plaintive?
“a typically plaintive song from Radiohead”
What does plaintive mean?
Plaintive means sounding sorrowful, mournful or melancholic.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plaintive (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use plaintive in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/plaintive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.