wistful
Only one letter separates the two words, but "wishful" is having hope for something, and wistful is having sadness or melancholy about something. "Wist" isn't even a word that's used anymore, but you can still be wistful.
People who appear wistful often show a longing for something or a look of serious reflection. One way to describe the adjective wistful is as the sad appearance of someone looking back and thinking "if only..." A thoughtful or pensive mood centered on something good in the past that is missed or something not so good in the present that could have been better "if only" something had gone differently — these things make for a wistful outlook.
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showing pensive sadness
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Vocabulary lists containing wistful
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
On the ACT Reading Test, you will almost certainly encounter questions that ask about an author's tone — that is, the author's attitude toward their subject matter. Master our comprehensive collection of common words used to describe an author's tone, and you'll be well prepared to tackle these questions.
On the New SAT, all of the Reading Test questions are multiple choice and are based on reading passages that may be taken from literature, science, the social sciences, or a US founding document (or a text inspired by such a document). Many of the reading comprehension questions meant to assess a student’s understanding of those passages will require students to choose words that best describe the writer’s tone or point of view, words like the 200 words you see on this list. Learn them here so when you see them in an SAT answer choice, you’ll know what they mean! Here are all of our word lists to help you prepare for the new SAT (debuting March of 2016): The Language of the Test, Multiple-Meaning Words, and Words to Capture Tone.