Adjective: pensive
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more pensive |
| Superlative | most pensive |
Sample Sentences
-
He sat in pensive silence, weighing his options carefully.
-
The author’s tone grows pensive in the final chapters.
-
Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce [1748, David Hume, Enquiries concerning the human understanding and concerning the principles of moral., London: Oxford University Press, published 1973, § 4:]
-
Through the deep grass the faces of the three children glowed like pensive moons. [1979, J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company, chapter 21:]
Adjectives inflected like pensive
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle English pensif, pensyfe, pencyve, from Old French pensif (“thoughtful”), from penser (“to think”) (from Latin pēnsō) + -if (English -ive).