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YEARNING
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Prolonged unfulfilled desire or need
Synonyms:
hungriness; longing; yearning
Classified under:
Nouns denoting feelings and emotions
Hypernyms ("yearning" is a kind of...):
desire (the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "yearning"):
hankering; yen (a yearning for something or to do something)
pining (a feeling of deep longing)
wishfulness (an unrealistic yearning)
wistfulness (a sadly pensive longing)
nostalgia (longing for something past)
discontent; discontentedness; discontentment (a longing for something better than the present situation)
Derivation:
yearn (have a desire for something or someone who is not present)
yearn (desire strongly or persistently)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
-ing form of the verb yearn
Context examples:
Before long the cat was seized by another fit of yearning.
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
And yet it was a surprise and a shock to himself to find how deeply she had entered into his life; how completely those vague ambitions and yearnings which had filled his spiritual nature centred themselves now upon this thing of earth.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
He experienced no suffering from estrangement—no yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
But Beth, though yearning for the grand piano, could not pluck up courage to go to the 'Mansion of Bliss', as Meg called it.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
"You too, my dearest," she said, with infinite yearning of pity in her voice and eyes.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
He looked, and was aware of a great yearning, akin in sensation to physical hunger.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement was the expression of its existence.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
It was long before Fanny could recover from the agitating happiness of such an hour as was formed by the last thirty minutes of expectation, and the first of fruition; it was some time even before her happiness could be said to make her happy, before the disappointment inseparable from the alteration of person had vanished, and she could see in him the same William as before, and talk to him, as her heart had been yearning to do through many a past year.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
