Tina Brown

With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information.

American Editor

Linda Grant

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!

British Novelist

Johann Johannsson

Brass has a very distinctive sound. It's delicate but powerful, but it's also melancholic and plaintive.

Icelander Composer

Lydia M. Child

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

American Activist

Use 'plaintive' to describe sounds conveying a deep emotional tone of sadness.

Emotional Tone

'Plaintive' often describes music or sounds, suggesting a haunting or sorrowful quality.

Musical Context

Can be used to give human emotion to inanimate objects or abstract concepts.

Personification

 And so he'll put foil all over the windows and dark curtains and shades because it also affects your families. And so here I was living in kind of this darkened environment, but so was he. And he'd gotten used to it. But then I would get these plaintive emails from him when he was at work.

What time is it on Mars?...

 our work and remembering our and very important history in the ways that we have persisted and overcame in nature even when nature was hostile to us we can turn to the plaintive lyrics of Billie Holiday's strange fruit to

Tracking Plastic Sea to...

 You probably know the feeling. Your phone utters its final plaintive "bleep" and cuts out in the middle of your call. In that moment, you may feel more like throwing your battery across the room than singing its praises,

How batteries work -...

 The chick responds and they slowly home in on one another. The plaintive entreaties of the chick stimulate the adult to regurgitate a mouthful of fish.