How to Use despairing in a Sentence

despairing

adjective

• The despairing cries of those who lost their beloved ones brought me to tears.
  — Jiwei Xiao, The New York Review of Books, 6 Apr. 2020
• Flyhalf Tusi Pisi was charged down by Vladimir Ostroushko and the ball fell in goal about a foot in front of his despairing dive.
  — San Diego Union-Tribune, 24 Sep. 2019
• Like someone from the young past has sent a missive to these old despairing people’s present.
  — Arthur Lubow, New York Times, 9 Mar. 2023
• Soon, the despairing pair devise a scheme to break up their exes' happy new unions.
  — Andrea Mandell, USA TODAY, 9 Feb. 2022
• The Iron Claw, a new biopic about the tragic Von Erich brothers, is rich with feeling and never despairing.
  — David Sims, The Atlantic, 20 Dec. 2023
• Her thoughts grew more despairing during the next few weeks in the hospital and then in the Navy’s psychiatric ward.
  — Melissa Chan, NBC News, 28 Apr. 2022
• The ball somehow evaded both Wilson and Seeler, but Weber slid in at the right hand post and lifted the ball over the despairing arms of Banks.
  — SI.com, 21 Mar. 2018
• The darkness is deeper and sometimes more despairing this year, but the jokes are just as frequent, and maybe even a bit more cathartic.
  — Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 11 May 2022
• For a man who succumbs to that kind of despairing metaphor, the prospect of nuclear holocaust does not seem so appalling.
  — Sasha Frere-Jones, Harper’s Magazine , 4 Nov. 2022
• The Game Two crowd was hardened by a tough loss; there was a palpably despairing edge in the building, only streaked through with joy.
  — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2 June 2021
• As with every collapse, despairing fans will spend the next few weeks looking for someone to blame.
  — Bill Plaschke, Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct. 2023
• Other than that, it’s all one long, despairing blur en route to becoming worm food.
  — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 25 Mar. 2021
• Two weeks after Per Se opened, another fire destroyed the kitchen, and a despairing Keller had to be talked out of breaking his lease.
  — Justin Davidson, Daily Intelligencer, 10 Jan. 2018
• The pattern of fearful and despairing thoughts can be stopped by bringing oneself back to the feeling of caring for others.
  — Brooke Schedneck, The Conversation, 1 Apr. 2020
• There’s a version of this film that would feel awkward for so much of its highs being undercut by such despairing lows.
  — K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 17 June 2021
• To those in addiction and despairing, Bing said, drugs feel like a solution — the thing that gets you through another painful day.
  — Jenna Portnoy, Washington Post, 16 Oct. 2023
• In a cynical, despairing world, a sugar pill that calls itself a sugar pill might be the sweetest thing around.
  — Tom Vanderbilt, WIRED, 19 Dec. 2023
• Is the guy who creeps back in her memory in the second verse and ruins the moment a lost love, or something far more despairing or sinister?
  — Andrew Unterberger, Billboard, 3 Oct. 2017
• The book is a despairing account of a boy and his father lurching across the cold, wretched, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world.
  — Dwight Garner, New York Times, 28 Nov. 2022
• After receiving the ball in the final third from Koke, the winger had the time to turn, compose and shoot a pin-point shot thunderously past a despairing Neto.
  — SI.com, 4 Feb. 2018
• But something more despairing is at play in Gray’s conception of this story.
  — K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 28 Oct. 2022
• People on all political sides and on none are scared and despairing.
  — Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review, 11 Jan. 2021
• Bologna came out with plenty of fight in the second half, and the hosts took the lead just before the hour mark, Roberto Soriano firing home from the edge of the box beyond a despairing Samir Handanovic.
  — SI.com, 2 Nov. 2019
• The daughter’s response is tearful, terse and despairing.
  — Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Mar. 2024
• Both felt that harm reduction efforts had saved their own lives, and helping others was a source of hope at a time that too often could feel despairing.
  — Joanna Slater, Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2022
• The starkest hint comes in a melodramatic drawing of a despairing young man, head in hands, by Johan Thomas Lundbye.
  — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 14 June 2023
• Japan doubled their lead on 52 minutes when Inui unleashed a thunderbolt shot off his right boot which flew past the despairing Courtois.
  — Ryland James, chicagotribune.com, 2 July 2018
• But his writing about his experiences was a good deal more self-aware, funny and despairing than that claim might suggest.
  — Daniel Lewis, BostonGlobe.com, 19 Nov. 2022
• The stories of these two towering figures touch something deep, nagging, and unresolved in the American psyche, a nexus of the best and the worst, the hopeful and despairing.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 1 Sep. 2021
• Her songs are always jubilant and despairing, resolute and unmoored, hopeless and stubbornly persistent all at once.
  — Reed Jackson, SPIN, 16 May 2024

Last Updated: 20 Aug 2024