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Wistful Has a Wishful History
We see you there, dear reader, gazing silently up at the moon, heart aching to know the history of wistful, as if it could be divined on the lunar surface. And we’d like to ease your melancholy by telling you that the knowledge you seek—nay, pine for—is closer at hand. But the etymology of wistful, while intriguing, is not entirely clear. It’s thought that the word is a combination of wistly, a now-obsolete word meaning “intently” and, perhaps, the similar-sounding wishful. Wistly, in turn, may have come from whistly, an old term meaning “silently” or “quietly.” What’s more certain is that our modern wistful is a great word to describe someone full of pensive yearning, or something inspiring such yearning.
Examples of wistful in a Sentence
January Lavoy Krish Seenivasan Ted Blaisdell, New York Times, 3 May 2025
But the Administration’s clip stripped the words of their wistful energy and doubleness of meaning and prefigured its intent to impose a single, cruel interpretation on a human being.
—Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2025
For The Times) On a recent morning at his Tujunga home, Gurr was getting a little wistful.
—Todd Martens, Los Angeles Times, 25 Apr. 2025
Now, our wistful protagonist and her friends are looking for clues along the edge of a supernatural abyss known as Glore Valley.
—Alison Foreman, IndieWire, 24 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for wistful
Cite this Entry
“Wistful.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wistful. Accessed 20 May. 2025.
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