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wistful

adj
/ˈwɪstfəl/

Etymology

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.

Definitions

  1. 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.
    • There are few sights that leave a railway lover more wistful than a desolate railway viaduct no longer carrying tracks. As with tunnels, so much effort was made to conquer the landscape, yet so many now stand forlorn.

  2. Sad and thoughtful.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at wistful. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01wistful02longing03greatly04nobly05noble06petty07begrudging08envious09desiring10yearning

A definitional loop anchored at wistful. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

10 hops · closes at wistful

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA