wistful
/ˈwɪstfəl/
wistful adjective: full of longing or yearning.
Adjective
wistful (comparative more wistful, superlative most wistful)
- Full of longing or yearning.
- His eyes grew wistful as he recalled his university days.
- Her grey eyes, looking out on the violet of the night sky, the trees, and the crowd of hilarious onlookers who had not been invited to Buckingham Palace, had a patient and wistful expression.1909 September 9, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], “A Court Ball”, in The Squire’s Daughter, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, published 1919, →OCLC, page 1
- Sad and thoughtful.
- Synonyms:
- despondent, unhappy, atrabiliary, atrabilious, blitheless, dispirited, blue, bummed out, chapfallen, cheerless
wistful meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada
wistful in Urdu
- آرزو مند, منتظر, مشتاق, متوجہ, راغب
wistful in Bengali
- আকুল আকাঙ্ক্ষা
wistful in Malayalam
- ഉത്സുകമായ, ജിജ്ഞാസുവായ, ആകാംക്ഷയുളള
wistful in Kannada
- ಆಸೆಯಿಂದ ಕೂಡಿದ, ಚಾಪಲ್ಯದ, ಹಾತೊರೆಯುವ, ಬಯಸುವ, ಉತ್ಕಂಠಿತ, ಹಂಬಲವುಳ್ಳ
More languagesFewer languages
- wistful in Persian
- حسرتمند hasratmand
Examples of wistful in a sentence
- There are few sights that leave a railway lover more wistful than a desolate railway viaduct no longer carrying tracks.
- Tetzlaff played the wistful melodic phrases with arching lyricism and radiantly penetrating pianissimos, while in the orchestra Mr.
- Stravinsky's wistful and brutal “Rite of Spring” has become a rite de passage for choreographers attracted to its rhythmic intricacies.
Synonyms of wistful
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of wistful
| comparative | more wistful |
|---|---|
| superlative | most wistful |
Origin of wistful
Presumably from *whistful, from whist (“silent”) + -ful, based on older wistly. It is implausible that it derives from wishful, the required sound change being wishful → *wisful → wistful, which could not occur in Modern English, particularly not with wishful continuing in use. However, the sense of “longing” appears to be influenced by wishful, making wistful an ambiguous poetic word.
Words formed from wistful
Questions about wistful
- What does wistful mean?
- Wistful means full of longing or yearning.
- What is wistful in Urdu?
- Wistful in Urdu is آرزو مند, منتظر, مشتاق. See Wistful meaning in Urdu.
- What part of speech is wistful?
- Wistful is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce wistful?
- Wistful is pronounced /ˈwɪstfəl/.
Words near wistful in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wistful (page history and authors); wistful (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wistful (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wistful (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wistful (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wistful.wav.
Cite this entry: “wistful.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wistful. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.