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POIGNANT
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Arousing affect
Example:
his gratitude was simple and touching
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Similar:
moving (arousing or capable of arousing deep emotion)
Derivation:
poignancy (a quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow))
Sense 2
Meaning:
Keenly distressing to the mind or feelings
Example:
poignant anxiety
Classified under:
Similar:
painful (causing physical or psychological pain)
Derivation:
poignance; poignancy (a state of deeply felt distress or sorrow)
Context examples:
Nay, you may have met with another whom you may love; and considering yourself as bound in honour to Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which you appear to feel.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
The youth and cheerfulness of morning are in happy analogy, and of powerful operation; and if the distress be not poignant enough to keep the eyes unclosed, they will be sure to open to sensations of softened pain and brighter hope.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I have a dim half-remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing; darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress more poignant: and then long spells of oblivion, and the rising back to life as a diver coming up through a great press of water.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
