poignant
She begins to question, with great poignancy, what her son's sacrifice was for.
There are many moments of almost unbearable poignancy in the film.
Even his faltering memory was a source of poignancy.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Saddening, shocking and upsetting
affecting
agonizingly
arrogance
baleful
be cold comfortidiom
disrespect
distressful
distressfully
distressing
distressingly
hubris
hurtful
hurtfully
impiously
impiousness
teary
touching
touchingly
tragically
traumatic

Examples of poignancy

poignancy
Particularly appreciated was the pathos of the narrative, the realism of the setting and the poignancy of the acting performances.
Stories are played with humour, poignancy, urgency, anger, despair, hope, compassion, and love.
Here, the dangers and potentialities of a ' real love affair ' are outlined with affecting poignancy.
The whole event and context was memorable for its historical and cultural poignancy.
There is today a poignancy about their invention both of a new taxonomy of housing design and of a concept of social architecture.
Further, there existed a feature of the colonial petition that added poignancy to the assertion of village boundaries.
Deaths of his friends may have a certain poignancy.
The preoccupation with time left to live loses some of its poignancy.
However, in many cases urban politics have given greater poignancy to rural ethnic identities, and made them a national concern. 19.
Of particular poignancy in this balancing act is the case of religious activity.
Despite, or perhaps because of this, there are moments of real beauty and poignancy in this highly individual concerto, inspired by contemporary political events.
The inclusion of a number of personal testimonies adds a human dimension and poignancy to the narrative that makes it compelling reading.
This was an image of infinite poignancy, showing a man and a woman in the silence of their half-built house.
This reading adds a particular poignancy to the basic ambivalence that seems to underlie the whole book.
But the remark had a literal poignancy.
See all examples of poignancy
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