Vocabulary
Desperate
English and Urdu gloss, synonyms and antonyms, and example usage from our editorial sentence cache where available.
English meaning
feeling or showing a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.
Example sentences (from Dawn)
Sentences are selected from stored editorial text where your search word appears. If none appear yet, run the admin sentence generator for fuller coverage.
- In one case, we received a desperate call about a woman who had been confined for nine days in one clinic.
- Desperate and shaken, the young woman confided in her school principal and a social worker, hoping for protection and support.
- Such events may quickly negate the desperate attempts to exude an aura of invincibility that set-ups with low legitimacy need badly and that cause their fall.
- There can be no doubt that waterborne diseases are set to rise; the scarcity of essential drugs threatens to turn an already desperate humanitarian situation into a major public health disaster.
- Pictures of starving children have been on television screens across the world and video footage of Israeli soldiers firing on desperate aid-seekers have gone viral on social media.
Synonyms
despairing, hopeless, anguished, distressed, in despair, suicidal, miserable, wretched.
Antonyms
cheerful, composed.
Curator example
“a desperate sadness enveloped Ruth”
More vocabulary to explore
About this vocabulary section.
These entries support close reading of Dawn editorials and opinion pieces: short definitions,
Urdu equivalents where we have them, word relations, and—when generated—real lines from the editorial archive
so you can see tone and usage.
Common questions
- Do I need to sign up to use this vocabulary page?
- No. Word pages are open to everyone. You can read meanings in English and Urdu, synonyms and antonyms, and example sentences without creating an account.
- Where do the example sentences come from?
- When available, example sentences are drawn from cached matches in our Dawn editorial corpus so you can see how a word is used in real newsroom-style prose.
- How is this different from a dictionary?
- This section is curated for students preparing for competitive exams and editorial reading. Entries are compact, often include Urdu glosses, and are paired with in-context lines from editorials when we have them.
