- moving
- moving, impressive, poignant, affecting, touching, pathetic are comparable when they mean having the power to excite or the effect of exciting deep and usually saddening and solemn emotion. Moving, the most general of these words, can be used in place of any of the others; the rest, though not mutually exclusive in their implications, can be used very specifically.Something moving stirs one deeply or evokes a strong emotional response (as by thrilling, entrancing, agitating, or saddening){
a moving scene in a play
}{a moving appeal for help
}{a modern version of the hero who for the good of mankind exposed himself to the agonies of the damned. It is always a moving subject— Maugham
}{a moving revelation of child life in an orphanage— MacColiy
}Something impressive imposes itself forcibly on the mind and compels a response (as of admiration, awe, wonder, or conviction){scenery . . . majestic without severity, impressive without showiness— Hardy
}{ordinary men cannot produce really impressive artworks— Shaw
}{I regret that I cannot put into more impressive words my belief that . . . the defendants were deprived of their rights— Justice Holmes
}Something poignant produces so painfully sharp an impression that it pierces one's heart or keenly affects one's sensitivities{it was warm and yet fresh; blindfold, one could have mistaken it for a morning in early May: but this kind of day . . . had a more poignant loveliness in autumn than in spring, because it was a receding footfall, a waning moon— Jan Struther
}{she left him with relief and a poignant sense of all she had wasted of the night— Malamud
}Something affecting moves one to tears or to some similar manifestation of feeling{even the most callous found the play affecting
}{an affecting reunion of a mother and her child
}{it would spoil this affecting story to explain what happened; but the reader's sickening anxiety may be relieved to hear that Rosa escaped with her purity still white as driven snow— Cunnington
}{the scenes of disappointment are quite affecting— Whitman
}Something touching arouses tenderness or compassion or melts the heart{a clean sober little maid, with a very touching upward look of trust— Galsworthy
}{touching not in the sense of pathos . . . but in the sense of sweetness, warmth, and gaiety— Mannes
}{most men's touching illusion as to the frailness of women and their spiritual fragility— Conrad
}Something pathetic moves one to pity. Sometimes the word suggests pity induced by compassion for one in sorrow or distress{a lonely old man .... Rather pathetic!—Archibald Marshall
}{pathetic gropings after the fragments of a shattered faith—Day Lewis
}Sometimes it suggests pity mixed with contempt for what is weak, inadequate, or futile{a pathetic confusion of aims— Binyony
}{a pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity— Huxley
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
