What's the difference between pensive and plaintive?

Pensive


Definition:

  • (a.) Thoughtful, sober, or sad; employed in serious reflection; given to, or favorable to, earnest or melancholy musing.
  • (a.) Expressing or suggesting thoughtfulness with sadness; as, pensive numbers.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Similarly literary and pensive was Clouds of Sils Maria , in which France's Olivier Assayas combined some modish themes — the internet, celebrity gossip, superhero movies — with some hoarier themes regarding the theatre-cinema divide, ageing and female rivalry.
  • (2) It celebrates smoking's conviviality and the splendid isolation of the smoker, the smoker's exhibitionism and her pensive introversion.
  • (3) Aware always of what he called "the desperately thin ice" we walked on, he surveyed the world and our place in it with a pensive realism, striking no heroic postures.
  • (4) Like Evra at Anfield the other week, he looks pensive.
  • (5) Watching 5,000 people stream into the UK's biggest nightclub, recently voted one of the top 20 clubs in the world by DJ magazine, boss Sacha Lord looks pensive.
  • (6) Gunduz, standing pensively before the image of Ataturk, seems to have a different idea of what is Turkish.
  • (7) His was a slow and pensive start, in which was not only overtaken by the Ferrari pair but also by Rosberg, Max Verstappen and Felipe Massa.
  • (8) The party leader, Pablo Iglesias , is featured looking pensive on his balcony, working at a table in a sparsely furnished room and watering a solitary ivy plant.
  • (9) The guitarist also revealed he is working on a new X-pensive Winos album, the first since 1992's Main Offender.
  • (10) Hou became Mao's personal photographer and, over 12 years, produced pictures that burnished his image and shaped the way he is seen even now: on the seashore; pensive before the Yellow river; jovial in a crowd.
  • (11) The plot of Anderson's pink gateau of a movie, with its dowager duchesses, murderers and bakers, turns on the fate of a "priceless" Renaissance portrait of a youth pensively clawing an apple with long, bony fingers.
  • (12) After all, the lead actor is Shia LaBeouf, a boy-man who never explains to viewers whether he's deliberately trying to be a cheap copy of pensive Ed Norton.
  • (13) Real Madrid's coach Carlo Ancelotti looks pensive ahead of the final.
  • (14) So it is right that data-privacy and data-retention issues involving Facebook, Google and their brethren are being scrutinised in the European courts , and that the European Commission is working up a consumer-data protection plan that would include the right to have your data erased – or as the EC puts it, with a pensive Mediterranean poetry, the "right to be forgotten".
  • (15) Messi runs around in delirium, Mascherano is in floods of tears, Sabella doesn't appear to believe he's led a team to a World Cup final (stop it, be nice), Kuyt, Robben and Sneijder look pensive, and Van Gaal goes around doing the polite thing, shaking hands.
  • (16) The rendition , complete with pensive stares, strummed chords and graceful spins of a floating guitar, went viral – Bowie himself retweeted it, quoting his 1995 song Hallo Spaceboy.
  • (17) Next was the high jump, the event she was more pensive about having had only four practice sessions this year.
  • (18) 7.57pm BST The teams are in the tunnel Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard is looking pensive, staring straight ahead as he waits to lead out Liverpool, whose players are wearing largely white shirts with red trim, black shorts and black socks.
  • (19) The 16-year-old, a slight boy with a pensive air, had hoped to reach his brother in Germany but had spent two months stranded in the squalid improvised refugee camp at Idomeni in northern Greece, praying for Macedonia to reopen the gateway to central Europe.
  • (20) It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era.

Plaintive


Definition:

  • (n.) Repining; complaining; lamenting.
  • (n.) Expressive of sorrow or melancholy; mournful; sad.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 3.46pm: The Guardian's Dan Sabbagh has just tweeted: Leveson asks Cameron plaintively for political consensus to get reforms through; the PM agrees.
  • (2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest More critical is Desculpa Neymar (Sorry Neymar) a plaintive critique by Edu Krieger that highlights some of the grievances of the anti-World Cup protests that have taken place across the country since last year.
  • (3) A quarter of a century after I was hanging around Brent Cross, I was one of the team at the New Economics Foundation on the Clone Town Britain campaign, a plaintive cry against everywhere looking the same.
  • (4) Mirrors (2016) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Over plaintive piano and a slurry of Trump misogyny, a group of young girls comb their hair before a question is posed.
  • (5) Without naming and shaming, during the USA's game against Portugal, I saw one leftwing tweeter ask with plaintive, stony-faced sincerity "how can anyone be supporting the imperialists?"
  • (6) One senior lieutenant made a plaintive call for funds.
  • (7) Indeed, the running message of the black spider letters is not potency but a plaintive sigh of woe at a world going to the dogs.
  • (8) The first plaintive cries for Rooney to be brought on could be heard late in the first half.
  • (9) It’s a fight between what I know my country should be and what I see it turning into, which is the plaintive cry of all American millennials.
  • (10) And she had just one plaintive answer when I asked how she was.
  • (11) David Cameron asked plaintively more than once at prime minister's questions.
  • (12) The news that Facebook has splurged $2bn (£1.2bn) on buying Oculus Rift , the world's first really viable virtual reality headset, has set off waves of plaintive snark in the world of videogames.
  • (13) asked the Irish Times plaintively, evoking the poetry of WB Yeats from 1913 to grieve over the surrender of Irish sovereignty to a bunch of IMF and ECB accountants.
  • (14) Search and update are not the same Many a high-profile tweeter has confused the "search" and "update status" boxes, leading to such horrors as @edballsmp's plaintive "ed balls".
  • (15) The centre posted some before-and-after pictures, along with a plaintive message confirming that someone had recently been up to no good with a brush.
  • (16) "We need your help," begins the plaintive ad on the front of the Whitehaven News.
  • (17) There were old men and women, too feeble to walk, who were placed in carts; the younger members of the community on foot were carrying their bundles of clothes … while the children, with looks of alarm, walked alongside … A cry of grief went up to heaven, the long plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach, was resumed … the sound re-echoed through the wide valley of Strath in one prolonged note of desolation".
  • (18) When Republicans repeatedly get on stage at their national convention and toss attack after attack at my mom,” she wrote in a plaintive letter to supporters, “calling her things I’d never say in front of my children – let alone on live TV – they’re talking about a caricature they’ve imagined, not the woman I love and respect.” As he sought to appear more presidential, even the GOP’s nominee, Donald Trump , seemed embarrassed by the baying crowd, waving aside demands for Clinton’s incarceration with hands that encouraged the mob instead to chant “USA!
  • (19) he marvels plaintively, pretending to find such interest in him unfathomable. "
  • (20) The centre posted some graphic before-and-after pictures, along with a plaintive message confirming that someone had recently been up to no good with a brush.