What's the difference between plaintive and unhappy?

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.

Unhappy


Definition:

  • (a.) Not happy or fortunate; unfortunate; unlucky; as, affairs have taken an unhappy turn.
  • (a.) In a degree miserable or wretched; not happy; sad; sorrowful; as, children render their parents unhappy by misconduct.
  • (a.) Marked by infelicity; evil; calamitous; as, an unhappy day.
  • (a.) Mischievous; wanton; wicked.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But what they take for a witticism might very well be true; most of Ellis's novels tell more or less the same story, about the same alienated ennui, and maybe they really are nothing more than the fictionalised diaries of an unremarkably unhappy man.
  • (2) Unless psychic rehabilitation is undertaken in tandem with physical rehabilitation, a spinal cord-injured patient is likely to become an unhappy social recluse or denizen of a chronic care facility, rather than an independent productive member of his community.
  • (3) Along the way, he fathered a child at 20 and immediately turned his back on her (they are now reunited), had a brief and unhappy marriage to the broadcaster Carol McGiffin and a series of frenetically unsatisfying relationships.
  • (4) I remind him that he had been unhappy with the penalty awarded to Barcelona in the Champions League game at Wembley last season, and he smiles.
  • (5) George Osborne may well end up in the unhappy position of trying to convince the public, in a haunting echo of the 2010 campaign, that he is still the man to bring the nation's finances back into balance by the end of the next parliament.
  • (6) Photograph: Rex If they are still unhappy they can go to the free Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), which resolves disputes between consumers and financial firms, although the PAC raised concerns about the service’s backlog of cases.
  • (7) Three months later the mothers appeared to be interacting normally with their infants, but they expressed feelings of unhappiness that persisted until the infants reached 9 months of age.
  • (8) So we're all very unhappy about it, but what can we do?
  • (9) The church excommunicated him in 1901, unhappy with his novel Resurrection and Tolstoy's espousal of Christian anarchist and pacifist views.
  • (10) He said Abbott was reflecting the “unhappiness we all have with what was a big error”.
  • (11) The distance to the original venue was around 50 miles and the manager, who was unhappy with the scale of travel on last summer’s US tour, vetoed having to make the round trip.
  • (12) I don't think she would have been unhappy for songs to be published."
  • (13) The academic, one of the country’s leading experts on the drug, is particularly unhappy with the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which has run well-publicised articles by two critics of statins that he argues are flawed and misleading.
  • (14) The house flourished but the marriage was bitterly unhappy and ended in divorce.
  • (15) "Unable to get petrol yesterday and missed a full day's work which will be unpaid, very unhappy," said one from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire.
  • (16) Splenectomy could gave a role in producing these unhappy results.
  • (17) He is reported to have expressed ­unhappiness at his own pending deployment and of US troops being responsible for the killing of fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • (18) The results, broadcast by Seven News on Wednesday, showed voters were also deeply unhappy with the performance of the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, and indicated that Turnbull enjoyed a strong lead as preferred prime minister.
  • (19) He says he was unconfident and largely unhappy at school.
  • (20) But the role opened my eyes to certain aspects of online gaming, such as harassment, abuse, threats and even stalking, and in many ways, it is an unhappy experience that I wish I could undo.