Synonyms:
brooding, broody, contemplative, meditative, musing, pensive, pondering, reflective, ruminative
Meaning: deeply or seriously thoughtful; "Byron lives on not only in his poetry, but also in his creation of the 'Byronic hero' - the persona of a brooding melancholy young man";
Usage examples
"Go to the devil," said Mr. Bloom, still pensive.
Servadac gazed upon the shattered marble, pensive and disheartened.
All three looked at each other, and all three smiled--a dreary, pensive smile enough.
She sate by the window on the little settle, sadly gazing out upon the gathering shades of night, which harmonised well with her pensive thought.
His first business was to seek Montraville, and endeavour to convince him that what had happened would ultimately tend to his happiness: he found him in his apartment, solitary, pensive, and wrapped in disagreeable reflexions.
But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it; those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation.
Ludovic Sforza "appeared before his troops and his people like the very spirit of lethargy," says a contemporary unpublished chronicle, "with his head bent down to the earth, and for a long while he remained thus pensive and without a single word to say.
"Perhaps I may," said Edward, although he felt that such would not be the case, having been accustomed to much better clothes when at Arnwood than what were usually worn by secretaries; and this remembrance brought back Arnwood in its train, and Edward became silent and pensive.
Laura went to bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation. She was pensive, the next day, and subdued; but that was not matter for remark, for she did not differ from the mournful friends about her in that respect.
(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions--all now ruthlessly swept away--throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.