What's the difference between pensive and poignant?

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.

Poignant


Definition:

  • (a.) Pricking; piercing; sharp; pungent.
  • (a.) Fig.: Pointed; keen; satirical.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Totò was a legend in the Vesuvian city – a comedian of genius; poignant, mysterious.
  • (2) Fleeting though it may have been (he jetted off to New York this morning and is due in Toronto on Saturday), there was a poignant reason for his appearance: he was here to play a tribute set to Frankie Knuckles, the Godfather of house and one of Morales's closest friends, who died suddenly in March.
  • (3) One of the most poignant exchanges came when Tony was asked by @ juliangratton to sum up the last seven years of his life.
  • (4) The exercise yard is adorned with poignant children's paintings in response to school trips here.
  • (5) This double bind may be particularly poignant for grandparents in single mother families.
  • (6) This addition was particularly poignant as Andrew Jackson’s legacy includes the decision to sign the Indian Removal Act of 1830 , which gave the federal government power to expel Native American tribes from their land.
  • (7) This poignant letter, addressing Recep Tayyip Erdogan and written by one of the protesters in Istanbul's historic Taksim Square , was widely circulated on Turkey's social media.
  • (8) Treasure Island gives us an intense sense of place, and a poignant coming-of-age story full of moral ambiguity.
  • (9) Their songs ranged from the almost unbearably poignant ("Hand in Glove") to the frankly vulnerable ("How Soon is Now").
  • (10) The image of the France midfielder walking, head bowed, past the World Cup trophy is one of the more poignant in football history.
  • (11) The second series of BBC1’s hit drama Happy Valley ended on Tuesday night , bowing out in a wondrous blaze of confrontation, perceptive resolution and poignant revelation.
  • (12) Ed Miliband said: "This is a tragic and poignant reminder of the sacrifices made by our armed forces in serving our country with bravery and distinction."
  • (13) But the American author, already the recipient of the Man Booker International prize, the Pulitzer and the National Book award , said it was "particularly poignant for me to have gotten news of the award only a few weeks after the death of Carlos Fuentes, who received the award in 1994".
  • (14) A picture sits on each one of the chairs, decorated by poignant letters, orange flowers and gifts.
  • (15) Or perhaps we could focus on the relationship of Leia and Solo, now married, and there could be a heart-rendingly poignant study of their elderly existence together, rather like Michael Haneke's Amour , but set in space.
  • (16) Dern, all windblown white hair and stubble, is often entirely silent and withdrawn, and all the more compelling and poignant for that.
  • (17) On the basis of this limited but poignant experience, we propose an outline of steps in management to help others avoid similar problems.
  • (18) Yet the narratives in Benefits Street have a human and poignant quality, often presenting decent and compassionate people disenfranchised by an unfair society.
  • (19) Sandy Nairne, director of the NPG, said: "The Van Dyck self-portrait is a poignant portrait of great significance.
  • (20) It was poignant, afterwards, to hear Martínez try to put the human element into some perspective.