What's the difference between downcast and melancholy?

Downcast


Definition:

  • (a.) Cast downward; directed to the ground, from bashfulness, modesty, dejection, or guilt.
  • (n.) Downcast or melancholy look.
  • (n.) A ventilating shaft down which the air passes in circulating through a mine.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Green campaigners were rejoicing over the departure of the climate sceptic, while the National Farmers' Union was downcast at the exit of a cabinet minister who consistently stuck up for rural areas.
  • (2) In a concession message posted on Facebook, Hofer urged his supporters to not be downcast.
  • (3) But a downcast-looking Slim had managed to fulfil his promise to play live for fans.
  • (4) Moyles opened the show after the 6.30am news bulletin sounding downcast and launched into a long diatribe: "Do you know what, I wasn't going to come in today.
  • (5) It’s not Trump,” said one downcast store-owner recently.
  • (6) I was in captivity for three months and 20 days,” she says, eyes downcast.
  • (7) Look at him earlier this week, a downcast shadow at his own manifesto launch.
  • (8) It's mood may be as relentlessly downcast as ever, but Amnesiac sees Radiohead drawing a vast array of sounds and influences into their woeful world.
  • (9) Defoe looked furious with himself for missing that one and his manager simply downcast as he chewed his gum with increasingly manic intensity.
  • (10) No downcast beams to light up what was coming, breaking water, way off the coast.
  • (11) Cameron, who began his own ARV treatment 15 years ago, added: "While people are downcast after Marikana [mine massacre] and the slowing economy, I think Aids point to a public service achievement and shows we can do it if we put our minds to it."
  • (12) Any honest reporter will record the sheer weight of indifference, ignorance and cynicism that sends you away downcast by the distance between the disengaged and our little world of political obsessives.
  • (13) "It's disappointing, I wasn't expecting this," said a deeply downcast Poyet.
  • (14) A downcast Pep Guardiola later admitted his defence's frailties.
  • (15) Aristide's wife stood with her eyes downcast, twisting a handkerchief.
  • (16) And Swanny, who is not the most demonstrative person on the planet, had this really weird look on his face and said, ‘You can’t give the j’accuse speech and then sit down and do your correspondence.’ I was thinking, ‘Well, that must have hit a bit harder than it felt.’” Across the chamber, her political foes looked suddenly downcast.
  • (17) Outfoxed, out of luck and abandoned as never before, he looked tired and downcast.
  • (18) In short, Luhansk, under the LPR, has become a city of downcast faces.
  • (19) Eyes downcast, head bowed, hands clasped and legs crossed; Eddie, an introverted wheelchair user, had been in a dementia care home for a decade when he began sessions with arts charity Age Exchange .
  • (20) A downcast Sanchez spent most of the hearing with his head bowed, appearing to fight back tears while the judge explained the charge to him.

Melancholy


Definition:

  • (n.) Depression of spirits; a gloomy state continuing a considerable time; deep dejection; gloominess.
  • (n.) Great and continued depression of spirits, amounting to mental unsoundness; melancholia.
  • (n.) Pensive maditation; serious thoughtfulness.
  • (n.) Ill nature.
  • (a.) Depressed in spirits; dejected; gloomy dismal.
  • (a.) Producing great evil and grief; causing dejection; calamitous; afflictive; as, a melancholy event.
  • (a.) Somewhat deranged in mind; having the jugment impaired.
  • (a.) Favorable to meditation; somber.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) One radio critic described Jacobs' late night Sunday show as a "tidying-up time, a time for wistfulness, melancholy, a recognition that there were once great things and great feelings in this world.
  • (2) And melancholy is not the only thing that links Haigh’s work.
  • (3) Melancholy originally had another meaning from the present one.
  • (4) the agitated type of involutional melancholy occurred twice as often in Canada as in Hungary, the apathetic cases were rarer in Canada, and the illness began earlier among Canadian women.
  • (5) Thus New Zealand, like other countries, may be entering an age of melancholy.
  • (6) English explanations stressed religious aspects and a relationship to melancholy.
  • (7) I too was attracted to the paintings of De Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives.
  • (8) Earlier this week in Janesville, where post-industrial melancholy is evident in a closed car plant and eerily quiet downtown, House speaker Paul Ryan crushed a Trump-style challenger in a congressional primary.
  • (9) There was always a rueful melancholy, stiffened by irony and leavened by humour about him.
  • (10) Song of the summer was Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, with its odd blend of keening melancholy and positivism.
  • (11) Resorting to a series of Ted the swordsman scenes which may merely be the lurid fantasies of the heroine, director Christine Jeffs never makes it clear whether Hughes was a rampaging philanderer whose sexual conquests and general obliviousness to Plath's mounting depression led to her demise, or a man driven into other women's arms by his wife's chronic melancholy - perhaps the most time-honoured excuse of the inveterate tomcat - or both.
  • (12) "Oh, if one of Dostoevsky's novels, whose black melancholy is regarded with such indulgent admiration, were signed with the name of Goncourt, what a slating it would get all along the line."
  • (13) It's a melancholy fate for any writer to become an eponym for all that he despised, but that is what happened to George Orwell, whose memory is routinely abused in unthinking uses of the adjective "Orwellian".
  • (14) As the lead singer with the Walker Brothers, he enjoyed a number of melancholy hits with songs such as The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, My Ship Is Coming In, No Regrets.
  • (15) The leading role is infinitely variable: as Oscar Wilde said , "There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies."
  • (16) In the right light and with the right song playing on the radio, there is a certain melancholy charm to this bleak highway with its unfolding panorama of wind turbines and electricity pylons stretching to the horizon.
  • (17) On the contrary: Sørens incomparable melancholy, mental agony and anxiety (fear or anguish) forced the faith, existing independently of them, in a radical refining.
  • (18) There’s a magnificent melancholy about him, this shadowy figure performing an act of unrequited love.
  • (19) Closer is a melancholy piece but it is also laugh-out-loud funny, often, as in the very best drama, at moments of starkest pain.
  • (20) Research is needed to determine whether youth will be predisposed to further depressive episodes and, if so, will we be entering a new age of melancholy?