Wishful means based on what you want rather than on what is so. Wishful thinking, purely wishful, a wishful look.
It survives almost entirely in wishful thinking, which is the standard name for believing something because you would like it to be true — one of the best-recognised faults in reasoning and one of the hardest to see in yourself. On its own, a wishful look means longing. Note that the word is wish plus -ful, so wishful thinking is literally thinking full of wishes.
1adjectivewishfulBased on what you want rather than on what is so.
“Hoping the exam would be cancelled was just wishful thinking.”
wishful is a quality of desire over fact.
Wish plus -ful. Wish comes from Old English wyscan, related to the German wünschen and at a distance to Venus, from a root meaning to desire.
Proto-Indo-European
*wenh₁- — to wish, love
Proto-Germanic
*wunskijaną — to wish
Proto-West Germanic
*wunskijan
Old English
wȳsċan — to wish
Middle English
wisshen
English
wish
English, today
wishful
From wish + ful. wish comes from Middle English wisshen, wischen, wuschen, from Old English wȳsċan (“to wish”), from Proto-West Germanic wunskijan, from Proto-Germanic wunskijaną (“to wish”), from Proto-Indo-European wenh₁- (“to wish, love”). Cognate with Scots wis (“to wish”), stq wonskje (“to wish”), West Frisian winskje (“to wish”), Dutch wensen (“to wish”), German wünschen (“to wish”), lb wënschen (“to wish”), Yiddish ווינטשן (“to wish”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål ønske (“to wish”), Faroese ynskja (“to wish, to desire”), Icelandic æskja, óska (“to wish”), Norwegian Nynorsk ønskja, ønskje, ønska, ønske, ynskja, ynskje (“to wish, to desire”), Swedish önska (“to wish”). Via PIE cognate with Latin Venus, veneror (“venerate, honour, love”), English wonder.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA