Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use yearning in a sentence

33 example sentences · noun

Yearning means a wistful or melancholy longing. Example: “She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again.”

Examples of yearning by meaning

nounA wistful or melancholy longing.

  • She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again.

More sentences with yearning

  • If he taught a class in yearning, I would take it.2024 October 1, Elizabeth Logan, “Adam Brody’s Typecasting Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving”, in Glamour. From the entry heart eyes
  • The Hollywood elitists had nominated two fraudumentaries on fake hospitals, yearning to breathe free.2020 February 22, Miri Wood, “Health Minister Discusses Status of Syria's Actual Hospitals”, in Syria News. From the entry fraudumentary
  • He preserves a deep yearning to see sinners get their come-uppance here on earth.2015, Alistair Cooke, Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements, →ISBN. From the entry come-uppance
  • Screaming, pain filled, and yearning for more peace yet none comes.2008, Sheri Nicole Karstok, Harbingers of Innocence, page 19. From the entry misgrieve
  • These sounds Darley interprets as Memnon’s yearning matin song to his mother Aurora, generative and diurnal originatrix.1978, Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins, Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 217. From the entry originatrix
  • This yearning to hear the pitter-patter of penguin feet is no sudden whim.1970 April 19, Pat McDonnell, “Project Penguin fowls out”, in Independent Press-Telegram, volume 19, number 36, Long Beach, Calif., →OCLC…. From the entry pitter-patter
  • When he spoke, too, his voice was like an old man's, harsh, yearning, querimonious.1955, Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers, Canongate, published 2012, page 190. From the entry querimonious
  • That very sense of longing, of yearning for the absent, which 'nostalgia' conveys to us now.1947, Cecil Day Lewis, Poetic Image. From the entry absent
  • As David puts it: “I have yearnt a yearning, O Lord, for Thy righteousness!”1917, H[yman] G[erson] Enelow, The Varied Beauty of the Psalms, New York, N.Y.: Bloch Publishing Company, page 58. From the entry yearnt
  • But for a little Black girl yearning to see herself represented on screen, Shandai had to take what she could get.2021 December 13, Veronica Wells, “Shoniqua Shandai On The One Aspect Of 'Harlem' That Almost Made Her Pass On Auditioning”, in Essence…. From the entry Shoniqua
  • And trying to sell him on carrots when he's yearning for Scooby-Doos poses a challenge similar to selling George W.2007, Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days, Simon and Schuster, page 28. From the entry Scooby-Doo
  • This "something sonly" is the vacuum of our hearts — a yearning emptiness that strains to be filled with Christ.2003, Calvin Miller, A Hunger for the Holy. From the entry sonly
  • When I eventually began to tire of the same old milkshaky taste, I still didn’t go back to yearning for simits.2001, Ernest Kolowrat, Confessions of a Hapless Hedonist: An Inconvenient Discovery About the Meaning of Pleasure, Xlibris, →ISBN, page 46. From the entry milkshaky
  • The "sensible" person, in contrast, recognizes that the yearning cannot be stilled, so he tries instead to push it under.1999, Marva J. Dawn, A Royal "Waste" of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World. From the entry push under
  • Reassignment can rekindle the yearning for city life in UYs who have spent many years in the villages.1977, Thomas P. Bernstein, “The Stability of the Settlement”, in Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from…. From the entry case in point
  • It is the source of many discontents among the millions of mishoused and dishoused families yearning to be rehoused.1975, George Albert Steiner, Business and Society, page 297. From the entry mishoused
  • Other times its horns proceed, slow yellow yearnings to live, they go eclipsed, delousing insectual nightmares dead to thunder, herald of genesis.2016 spring, Cesar Vallejo, translated by Alvaro Cardona-Hine, “Trilce”, in Malpaís Review, volume 6, number 4, Placitas, N.M., →ISSN…. From the entry insectual
  • We knew of this, the secret language grew between my yearning, between her submission, temporary and fleeting, only to be caught again.2013, V. S. Atbay, Epiphany - A Collection of Poems. From the entry mamihlapinatapai
  • So while Ralph generally seems to inhabit a different, more glorious and joyful universe than everyone else here his yearning and heartbreak are eminently relateable.2012 August 5, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “I Love Lisa” (season 4, episode 15; originally aired 02/11/1993)”, in…. From the entry seem
  • The City, it seemed to her, knew it dimly, with a yearning faint as dawn's forelight, which grew stronger with each passing hour, inevitably.2003, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Queen City Jazz. From the entry forelight
  • There was all that "longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning, the idle hopes, the joys and tears," which, God knows, Kate had personally experienced.1991, Celestine Sibley, Ah, sweet mystery. From the entry hot ziggety
  • I'm with yearn, (my) sweetheart's too; Both of us should have a doctor, Doctor to bedoctor us, To deliver us from yearning.1967, Béla Bartók, Benjamin Suchoff, Rumanian Folk Music. From the entry bedoctor
  • For artists their work objectifies their yearning for love, "thatched" as we all are "in a thicket of loneliness, huddled in onlyhood."1963, The Critic - Volume 21, Issue 4. From the entry onlyhood
  • Born in the digital twilight of MySpace, Facebook, and DeviantArt, Welwitschia Goth tapped into the emo and goths yearning for something both creepy and beautiful at the same time.2025 August 20, Sterling Rhyn, “25+ Welwitschia Goth (whimsical emo) Crochet Patterns to Make”, in Cactus Lady Creation, archived from the…. From the entry Welwitschia Goth
  • The young witches made their relationship official — in the Biblical sense — and Welch’s howling entreaty, “I’d do anything to make you stay,” expressed their yearning and desperation.2012 March 23, Lanford Beard, “TV Jukebox: 'The Secret Circle,' 'The Voice,' 'Switched at Birth,' and more music-on-TV moments”, in…. From the entry in the biblical sense
  • These nonblack members are trying to synthesize the tension of an anti-discrimination logic, a multicultural yearning for diversity, and a simultaneous defense of BGLOs’ core “blackness”.2008: Gregory S. Parks [ed.], Julianne Malveaux [foreword], and Marc Morial [afterword], Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the…. From the entry hyperregulate
  • My friend Jeffrey Jowell, who grew up in Cape Town, has lived away from South Africa for more than forty years, yearning for snoek the entire time.2004, Calvin Trillin, The strange attraction of snoek: The New Yorker, volume 80, page lxxxvi. From the entry snoek
  • But why are the heaven-bathed souls consumed by the yearning to sleep, to embrace the narcotic, papaverous hymns of Orpheus to Night and Sleep, to leave being for becoming?2004, Michael J. B. Allen, “Life as a Dead Platonist”, in Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees, Martin Davies, editors, Marsilio Ficino: His…. From the entry papaverous
  • In areas with no sidewalks, beaten-down paths in the grass, known as "desire lines" in planning-speak, indicate yearning, said John La Plante, the chief traffic engineer for T.2003 January 5, Patricia Leigh Brown, “Whose sidewalk is it, anyway?”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 27 May 2015. From the entry desire line
  • Having shaken the dust of the ugly new South Africa from his feet, is he yearning for the South Africa of the old days, when Eden was still possible?2002, J[ohn] M[axwell] Coetzee, chapter 17, in Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, 1st American edition, London: Vintage Books, →ISBN…. From the entry yearn
  • In my understanding, the desire for “the smile on the coffined face,” is the habitual yearning of the person to identify him or herself with an image, with a form.2014, Branka Arsic, American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron. From the entry coffined
  • The poem is also Acmeist in the speaker’s countering of his previous emotional abandon (“a thousand sorrows”) with his present moderation—a simple declaration of love instead of exhaustion and yearning.2006, Kirsten Blythe Painter, Flint on a Bright Stone: A Revolution of Precision and Restraint in American, Russian, and German Modernism…. From the entry acmeist

Meaning of yearning

  1. noun A wistful or melancholy longing.
  2. noun Rennet (an enzyme to curdle milk in order to make cheese).

Full definition of yearning

Questions about yearning in a sentence

How do you use yearning in a sentence?
Yearning is used as a noun. For example: “She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again.”
What is a short sentence with yearning?
“She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again.”
What does yearning mean?
Yearning means a wistful or melancholy longing.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yearning (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 yearning in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/yearning. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.