Tearful means crying, or close to tears. A tearful goodbye, tearful and shaking, look tearful.
It covers the state before the crying as much as the crying itself, which is what makes it useful. A tearful farewell is the fixed phrase. The tear in it rhymes with fear, not with air, which is a different word entirely.
1adjectivetearfulCrying, or close to tears.
“The little boy was tearful after losing his favourite toy at the park.”
tearful is a state.
Tear plus -ful, from Old English tear, a teardrop, from a Germanic root.
Proto-Indo-European
*der- — to tear, tear apart
Proto-Germanic
*teraną — to tear, tear apart, rip
Old English
teran — to tear, lacerate
Middle English
teren
English
tear
English, today
tearful
From tear + -ful. tear comes from Middle English teren, from Old English teran (“to tear, lacerate”), from Proto-Germanic teraną (“to tear, tear apart, rip”), from Proto-Indo-European der- (“to tear, tear apart”). Cognate with Scots tere, teir, tair (“to rend, lacerate, wound, rip, tear out”), Dutch teren (“to eliminate, efface, live, survive by consumption”), German zehren (“to consume, misuse”), German zerren (“to tug, rip, tear”), Danish tære (“to consume”), Swedish tära (“to fret, consume, deplete, use up”), Icelandic tæra (“to clear, corrode”). Outside Germanic, cognate to Ancient Greek δέρω (“to skin”), Albanian ther (“to slay, skin, pierce”). a doublet of tire.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA