Englishyearn
verb
she yearned to be with him:
long, pine, crave, desire, want, want badly, wish, have/feel a longing, covet, lust, pant, hunger, thirst, ache, be aching, itch, be itching;
hanker after, dream of, fancy, have one's heart set on, be bent on, eat one's heart out over;
informal have a yen, yen, be dying;
archaic be athirst for, be desirous;
rare suspire for.
| choose the right word | yearn, long, pine, hanker |
■ To yearn for something is to desire it intensely, even though it is difficult or impossible to obtain; recognition of this means that the desire tends to be mixed with sorrow or melancholy (she yearned for her missing father | his ambition was always yearning after the impossible | I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle). ■ To long is also to feel a deep desire (she'd longed to hear him whisper that he loved her), but it may also be used more trivially to say that one very much wants something, especially food or drink, that one is quite likely to get soon (I'm longing for a cup of tea). ■ To pine is to long for someone or something that one has lost (even though he had a new girlfriend she still pined for him), and is often used of animals who lose their owners. When used without for, it means to decline mentally or physically as a result of such longing (she was the Major's gundog and had pined badly when her master died). ■ Hanker is a less formal word than yearn and, compared with long, implies a vaguer, more wistful, or more forlorn desire (it may be that you hanker after some lost love | she had always hankered for a job in uniform | I've been hankering to play country music again). | |