What's the difference between wistful and yearning?

Wistful


Definition:

  • (a.) Longing; wishful; desirous.
  • (a.) Full of thought; eagerly attentive; meditative; musing; pensive; contemplative.

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) I can't pull an invisibility cloak over my house – nor would I wish to," she said, a little wistfully, as if she really wished she had Harry Potter's magic powers.
  • (3) The age-courses of concentrations of reduced (GSH) and oxidized (GSSG) glutathione, of GSH synthesizing enzyme activities, of glutathione S-transferase (GST), of GSSG-reductase (GR) and of biliary GSH and GSSG export were measured in livers from male Uje:WIST rats.
  • (4) – but Russell happily slips in and out of voices and lines from the movie, his recollections punctuated by wistful sighs.
  • (5) The former Internazionale owner Massimo Moratti has been staring wistfully into the distance and wonder what might have been if he had not dished his dosh on the Special One rather than mere players.
  • (6) Shareholders may be forgiven for thinking wistfully of the £55 which Pfizer offered to pay for each of their shiny shares.
  • (7) Jeremy Corbyn still speaks about it wistfully – a rally in Glasgow’s Old Fruitmarket that turned into one of the most emotional moments of his leadership campaign.
  • (8) Softness and tenderness, wistful ironies” he conceded as blindspots, describing Motown as mere “foot fodder” but having a lot of time for relatively minor practitioners such as Joe Tex , who he saw as “hugely smug” but with “great charm and inventiveness”.
  • (9) Every now and then I get wistful for when I was just a consumer of games because I can never have that back, but fortunately the love of the work is strong enough that I’m okay with that, and I’ve played so many life-changing games because I’m seeking them through the lens of a developer.
  • (10) The antiarrhythmic effects and pharmacodynamics of tobanum were evaluated in 28 patients wist paroxysms of reciprocal atrioventricular tachycardia, by using transesophageal cardiac pacing.
  • (11) After the jet-black high school satire Heathers pulled the rug out from under John Hughes and his oversharing Brat Pack, in 1989, American adolescents were left with few offerings, most of them wistful odes to another age – either stylistically, as with the overblown, pirate-radio-themed Christian Slater vehicle Pump Up the Volume; or quite literally, in the case of Richard Linklater’s nostalgia-fuelled 70s pastiche, Dazed and Confused.
  • (12) We are sitting in a boardroom on the seventh floor of the new Birmingham library , the glass walls allowing us a view of a city draped in mist, a sharp contrast to the "paradise" of Swat, with its tall mountains and clear rivers which Malala recalls wistfully.
  • (13) "Oh, it was lovely," said the retired factory worker, 61, as he smiled wistfully in the bright sunshine.
  • (14) The subjects (N = 30) were grouped into high and low levels of thought dysfunction, as measured by the Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST).
  • (15) Recently an individually administered instrument (WIST) was introduced as a brief, objective, and quantitative measure of schizophrenic thought processes.
  • (16) There's one aspect of his former life he misses: "The sweat," he sighs wistfully.
  • (17) [Small Talk thinks back wistfully to a time when ice creams were bigger, Liverpool were challenging for the league, Glenn Medeiros was top of the charts…] So you caught the cycling bug?
  • (18) Ss were administered a conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional or biconditional rule learning task, WIST, and Shipley-Hartford Memory Scale.
  • (19) It is now possible to separate wistful thinking from reality.
  • (20) It was with a mixture of wistfulness and his usual forthright bullishness that Sam Allardyce, briefly moving his attention away from the 21st-century football that West Ham United intend to confront Chelsea with on Friday afternoon, looked back eight years and contemplated what he might have achieved in his final season at Bolton Wanderers if he had received greater financial backing – or, to be precise, any financial backing – when his team were hovering around the Champions League places at Christmas.

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.