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Wistful Has a Wishful History
We see you there, dear reader, gazing silently up at the moon, heart aching to know the history of wistful, as if it could be divined on the lunar surface. And we’d like to ease your melancholy by telling you that the knowledge you seek—nay, pine for—is closer at hand. But the etymology of wistful, while intriguing, is not entirely clear. It’s thought that the word is a combination of wistly, a now-obsolete word meaning “intently” and, perhaps, the similar-sounding wishful. Wistly, in turn, may have come from whistly, an old term meaning “silently” or “quietly.” What’s more certain is that our modern wistful is a great word to describe someone full of pensive yearning, or something inspiring such yearning.
Examples of wistful in a Sentence
Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 18 Sep. 2025
The night delivered 18 songs in two hours, from political and environmental protest numbers to love songs, from wistful tales of days and friends gone by to, at one point, an ode to his tour bus.
—Peter Larsen, Oc Register, 16 Sep. 2025
Co-written with Claire Douglas, Hannah Ellis, and Jason Massey, the song explores the uneasy tendency to sabotage our own happiness, pairing wistful guitars with Velasco's soaring vocals.
—Daniel Fusch, USA Today, 12 Sep. 2025
Now summer is slinking off and autumn is rushing in, cool and a little wistful.
—Erik Kain, Forbes.com, 6 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for wistful
Cite this Entry
“Wistful.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wistful. Accessed 21 Sep. 2025.
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