What's the difference between melancholy and yearning?

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?

Yearning


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Yearn

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The next few days may well determine whether, this time, such loyalty will be in vain; but, while yearning for a clarion call and what was described as "vision" in this paper's leading article yesterday, I need to pose some pretty stark questions to Guardian readers.
  • (2) The therapist thus provides space for yearnings and compensatory 'counterworlds', frequently leading to a positive contact in a subsequent dialog about the wishes.
  • (3) I yearned for solitude; most of all, I wanted to sleep alone.
  • (4) This earlier shadow, this yearning and refracted autobiography, places Ballard at the heart of fiction of the unreal.
  • (5) The right not to be imprisoned without a fair trial has become the centrepiece of respect for the rule of law all around the world, and yet, when Ms Lynch stated at Runnymede that the fundamental principles of the Magna Carta have “given hopes to those who face oppression” and have “given a voice to those yearning for the redress of wrongs,” it was impossible not to think of Shaker Aamer, and others in Guantánamo, also “yearning for the redress of wrongs,” but finding that yearning repeatedly unfulfilled.
  • (6) As a Scot, I've found it hard not to compare the yearning for independence in Kashmir to the yearning for independence in Scotland.
  • (7) They have also retrofitted old-style nationalism for their growing populations of uprooted citizens, who harbour yearnings for belonging and community as well as material plenitude.
  • (8) Last, and this is just a hunch as a career-long only-digital nerd: perhaps after more than a decade of digital influx, people are yearning a bit more for the physical, the tangible object, the easy-to-understand.
  • (9) How can free expression and the yearning for a private life be protected in this murky arena of a gossip free-for-all?
  • (10) Cooper yearns to get back to the stage and hopes to appear in the National's new production of Racine's Phèdre next year.
  • (11) And what anti-immigrant opinion actually yearns for is to see fewer of these people on their high street."
  • (12) Nostalgia was the soldiers’ malady – a state of mind that made life in the here and now a debilitating process of yearning for that which had been lost: rose-tinted peace, happiness, loved ones.
  • (13) To send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, "You matter to us.
  • (14) They yearn to be taken seriously as a credible, national political force.
  • (15) The marked increased in yearning for cardiac life support skills amongst medical and nursing staff has been a major factor in the proliferation of life support training programmes at the Centre.
  • (16) Her entertaining descriptions of her time spent cooking in Chendung's famous cooking school combined with her simple, concise translations of what she learned made me yearn to start cooking immediately.
  • (17) Because people whose entire news network is dedicated to stoking the fear, anger and passions of citizens by way of animating myths and repeated use of the word “they” – they all know that 100% accuracy is immaterial to that which the heart yearns to hear.
  • (18) Sue: No matter what age, what gender, everybody feels a deep heart and groin yearning for Mary.
  • (19) Bernie is giving voice to a yearning that is out there, and that’s going to be very hard for the political establishment to overcome.” “[Tea Party Republicans] see their life chances limited, their country deteriorating along with their hopes for their children,” she adds.
  • (20) The demise of traditional opposition movements has led many to look for alternative forms of struggle, and created a yearning for God-given moral lines.