On sighs

Merriam Webster's Dictionary definition of a sigh

1.Emit a long, deep, audible breath expressing sadness, relief, tiredness, or a similar feeling

In a sentence. Jimmy let out a deep sigh of relief after he finished cleaning up elephant poop and getting each one of the items on his wife's extraordinarily lengthy, and complicated grocery list, a list that caused him to have to ask, on three separate occasions, a store employee, whose English was marginal at best, where to find them. And don't even get me started on the sort of day that the store employee was having and the sigh he emitted when he finally got home from work in his un-air conditioned house and sat down on the couch with a cold beverage.

(of the wind or something through which the wind blows) Make a sound resembling this

The wind rushing through the trees, causing lots of devastation in its wake, no less than three power lines down, leaving 4,500 homes without power and eventually resulting in the alleged death of eight people over the age of eighty five who were unable to withstand the heat wave that followed on the storm's heels like a draught of perfume in the wake of some passing woman, and in the middle of this storm children were seen to be gazing listlessly at blank screens trying to conjure up the games that they'd heard that other children used to play in the dark, made them sigh.


Feel a deep yearning for (someone or something lost, unattainable, or distant)

James sighed in a deep and resonant way that Missy, the girl he was kind of dating in the interregnum while his girlfriend was away, mistook for a sign that he was deeply missing that missing girlfriend, and set about haranguing him for the better part of the afternoon, slipping into and out of a thick Midwestern accent, depending on the degree of her anger, an accent that he found incredibly annoying and shrill, when he was in fact not sighing for the long lost girl but for the ocean, which he had left behind years ago, but which he had always missed on Tuesdays like this one: the sky an envelope of clouds and the traffic on Main Street abysmal.

Here is an article about sighing that supports none of the dictionary definitions listed above because it is from a medical perspective and not particularly interesting. Unlike the Wikipedia entry which is tremendous:

A sigh is an audible exhalation of air arising from tiredness or emotion, usually sadness, which itself could be stemming from feelings of sadness or futility. A sigh can also arise from positive emotions such as relief. Some people do it just to cool down organs or suppress emotions.
The word may also refer to:
Sigh (band), a Japanese metal band

My brother has a deep sigh that his wife calls his death sigh. I also have a tendency to sigh in a way that communicates both sadness and futility. And, at the end of my day today I sighed deeply as I left work, so deeply that a person who I didn't even know felt compelled to say, "That was a world weary sigh!"

It must have been some kind of sigh for him to feel comfortable crossing over that barrier of stranger to stranger contact. I'm not a big fan of that myself, and I'd probably hesitate to tell someone they were on fire unless I'd at least had one solid conversation with them beforehand.

Here is a picture of a monkey: