What's the difference between melancholy and sprightly?

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?

Sprightly


Definition:

  • (superl.) Sprightlike, or spiritlike; lively; brisk; animated; vigorous; airy; gay; as, a sprightly youth; a sprightly air; a sprightly dance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The gloom was soon to build when five minutes after the interval Giggs won a corner with a sprightly run.
  • (2) Charles Pooter, a man with a biography, a face, a surname, and even a proper wife and a degree of affection for his none to noteworthy existence, gives a sprightly and daily account of his own life in the form of a diary.
  • (3) Blatter will be a sprightly 94 years old by then, so if you think his judgement's gone now, it'll be very interesting to see what modernist masterpiece he commissions when the task finally needs sorting.
  • (4) Stuck between the cultist Friends of Radio 3 and Global Radio’s sprightly three-times-the-size Classic FM, the network vacillates between populist copying and public service broadcasting stodge.
  • (5) Photograph: Mimi Mollica for the Guardian Antonino Vaccarino, a sprightly, bespectacled 68-year-old, today runs a small cinema in the back streets of town, but once served as mayor before being jailed for five years for mafia membership – on the basis, he claims, of false accusations made by a turncoat.
  • (6) Buffon does not look especially sprightly as he comes for it but manages to punch it to safety.
  • (7) In Aronofsky's film, Crowe takes the title role of the man said to be around 600 at the time of the flood, while Hopkins is Methuselah, who was a sprightly 969.
  • (8) From the outset, Arsenal had been the more sprightly and inventive, and that pattern continued when Cesc Fábregas clipped a dainty ball over the Spurs defence for Nasri to chase.
  • (9) Excerpts from the diary show him to be a liberal-minded man and one fond of the company of young people; and show Betty to be a sprightly young Quakeress, buffeted by emotional conflicts between loyalty to her north-country fiance and her flirtation with young Dr. John Coakley Lettsom.
  • (10) Judy was under five feet tall, a sprightly figure, vivacious and pretty rather than beautiful, her pale skin accentuated by the bright red of her lips in the old three-strip Technicolor.
  • (11) He is a sprightly, bearded Dubliner of 48 who has a plumbing business called Associated Response and wears its uniform every day in the dock, as he is still doing work in the evenings and at weekends.
  • (12) A few weeks later, we meet at a photographic studio in east London: the sun is shining, Radcliffe's cough has gone, and he looks more sprightly than ever.
  • (13) There may be something in that, but many observers believe it has simply been a matter of the sprightly Martial finally persuading a somewhat stubborn manager that it does not make sense to have Rooney as first point of attack any more.
  • (14) National anthems: We all know them by now and Uruguay's remains more lovable - a sprightly number with menacing undertones.
  • (15) With Cameron Jerome well shackled by Daniel Ayala it was the sinuous runs of the sprightly Wes Hoolahan that offered Norwich’s most likely route to an equaliser.
  • (16) Messages with identical content (the same script and visual shot sequence) were made in two forms: child program forms (animated film, second-person address, and character voice narration with sprightly music) and adult program forms (live photography, third-person address, and adult male narration with sedate background music).
  • (17) Begovic had to be more sprightly in the 18th minute to turn away a curling effort from the edge of the area by Willian.
  • (18) I want to swim until I turn 105 if I can live that long,” the sprightly Nagaoka told Kyodo News.
  • (19) For the first time this season, the odd sprightly period of the occasional game aside, José Mourinho witnessed his side impose themselves on a contest, dominate for lengthy periods, and revel in clear superiority.
  • (20) Among most cases, the less sprightly life is dominant around preadolescence, which affects the orientation of psychopathology in adolescence.