(a.) Causing intense grief; overpowering with anguish; very distressing.
Example Sentences:
(1) "That is a heartrending song," says Guardian music writer Alexis Petridis.
(2) It was a fraction of the usual price – $6,000 a person – but even for Nogales, a gritty Mexican border city filled with hard luck stories, the Guatemalan couple’s plight was heartrending.
(3) 'Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold,' he sang memorably in the heartrending 'When Doves Cry'.
(4) A broad range of delegates were ineffably moved by Hu's speech, which contained heartrending lines such as "the scientific outlook on development is the theoretical guidance the party must adhere to for a long time".
(5) Val McDermid Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian The late, great Michael Marra , the Bard of Dundee, once wrote a heartrending and witty song called "Beefheart and Bones" about a couple divvying up their CD collection after a breakup.
(6) The visual results in some cases have been gratifying and in others heartrending.
(7) It is packed with striking statistics and heartrending stories, in the words of people being put through this inhuman and degrading assessment.
(8) She was collaborating at the time, with superb recklessness – or courage – on a book, Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story , which sprung on an unsuspecting nation and its ruling family a heartrending tale of her misery and betrayal at the hands of Prince Charles.
(9) The fact that he is, only makes him more heartrending.
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?