Word.ws English Dictionary

wishful

/ˈwɪʃfəl/

wishful adjective: wished-for; desired, wanted.

wishful: A white dandelion seed head backlit by the sun in a green meadow
Photo by K Atkinson on Unsplash

Adjective

wishful (comparative more wishful, superlative most wishful)

  1. (obsolete) Wished-for; desired, wanted.
    • The cry whereof entring the hollow cave / Eftsoones brought forth the villaine, as they ment, / With hope of her some wishfull boot to have.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. Expressing a wish or longing for something.
    • When she weighed anchor I went to the waterside and looked at her with a very wishful and aching heart, and followed her with my eyes and tears until she was totally out of sight.1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 5, in The Interesting Narrative, volume I
  3. Aspiring, or seeking advancement.

wishful meaning in Urdu and Gujarati

wishful in Urdu

آرزو مند, خواہاں, ملتمس, مشتاق, پرتمنا, راغب

wishful in Gujarati

ઈચ્છાળુ

Examples of wishful in a sentence

  • Even more amusing is that those doing the wishful humping in bandslash aren't your usual pin-ups.
  • I’ve become sceptical of cookingware “no-stick” signs: they are symptomatic of modern “wishful thinking.”
  • Nicholas, or Kris Kringle," he began, "represents a classic expression of the wishful dreaming of all children.

All 11 example sentences with wishful

Forms of wishful

comparativemore wishful
superlativemost wishful

Origin of wishful

From wish + -ful.

Words formed from wishful

Phrases with wishful

Words that rhyme with wishful

Questions about wishful

What does wishful mean?
Wishful means wished-for; desired, wanted.
What is wishful in Urdu?
Wishful in Urdu is آرزو مند, خواہاں, ملتمس. See Wishful meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is wishful?
Wishful is an adjective.
How do you pronounce wishful?
Wishful is pronounced /ˈwɪʃfəl/ (UK).

Words near wishful in the dictionary

  1. wishes upon a star
  2. wishes well
  3. wishes you well
  4. wishest
  5. wisheth
  6. wishful
  7. wishful hoping
  8. wishful recycling
  9. wishful thinker
  10. wishful thinkers
  11. wishful thinking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wishful (page history and authors); wishful (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wishful (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wishful.wav.

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