| / English Dictionary |
HOPEFUL
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
An ambitious and aspiring young person
Example:
the audience was full of Madonna wannabes
Synonyms:
aspirant; aspirer; hopeful; wannabe; wannabee
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("hopeful" is a kind of...):
applicant; applier (a person who requests or seeks something such as assistance or employment or admission)
Derivation:
hopeful (likely to turn out well in the future)
hopeful (having or manifesting hope)
II. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Likely to turn out well in the future
Example:
a hopeful new singer on Broadway
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Similar:
auspicious (auguring favorable circumstances and good luck)
Derivation:
hopeful (an ambitious and aspiring young person)
hopefulness (full of hope)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Having or manifesting hope
Example:
found a hopeful way of attacking the problem
Classified under:
Similar:
anticipant; anticipative; expectant (marked by eager anticipation)
Also:
encouraging (giving courage or confidence or hope)
optimistic (expecting the best in this best of all possible worlds)
Antonym:
hopeless (without hope because there seems to be no possibility of comfort or success)
Derivation:
hopeful (an ambitious and aspiring young person)
hopefulness (the feeling you have when you have hope)
Context examples:
Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy, and her occupations were hopeful.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
This study sends a hopeful message that ecosystems can be surprisingly resilient if given enough time after a major disturbance, said Doug Levey, a program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology.
(Coastal birds can weather the storm, but not the sea, National Science Foundation)
In addition, as understanding of the honey bee’s relatively straightforward microbiome increases, the ARS researchers are hopeful that bees may offer an excellent model in which to study the much more complex microbiome of other species including humans.
(Species Shifts in the Honey Bee Microbiome Differ with Age and Hive Role, U.S. Department of Agriculture)
I would entertain myself in forming and directing the minds of hopeful young men, by convincing them, from my own remembrance, experience, and observation, fortified by numerous examples, of the usefulness of virtue in public and private life.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
The little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with half-frightened, half-hopeful eyes, as one who is not sure whether he is on the verge of a windfall or of a catastrophe.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
It may be that the police resented the intrusion of an amateur, or that they imagined themselves to be upon some hopeful line of investigation; but it is certain that we heard nothing from them for the next two days.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
But experts are hopeful.
(Scientists find new approach that shows promise for treating cystic fibrosis, National Institutes of Health)
I gazed on it with gloom and pain: nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying, or hopeful, or subduing did it inspire; only a grating anguish for her woes—not my loss—and a sombre tearless dismay at the fearfulness of death in such a form.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
The researchers are hopeful that the study will help catalyse scale-up of automated chlorination technologies, which could contribute to global progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 for universal access to safe, affordable drinking water.
(Chlorine dispensers fitted to public taps cut child diarrhoea, SciDev.Net)
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