What's the difference between barren and bleak?

Barren


Definition:

  • (a.) Incapable of producing offspring; producing no young; sterile; -- said of women and female animals.
  • (a.) Not producing vegetation, or useful vegetation; /rile.
  • (a.) Unproductive; fruitless; unprofitable; empty.
  • (a.) Mentally dull; stupid.
  • (n.) A tract of barren land.
  • (n.) Elevated lands or plains on which grow small trees, but not timber; as, pine barrens; oak barrens. They are not necessarily sterile, and are often fertile.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Blueberry barrens stretch over several acres in Wesley, Maine.
  • (2) During a year of residence in the essentially allergen-free, barren environment of Antarctica, allergic subjects were entirely sypmtom-free.
  • (3) Mean calving to conception intervals were 91.4 and 85.3 days (P < 0.01) and the incidence of barren cows was 10.2 and 5.3% (NS).
  • (4) Nobody is sure what dangerous chemical imbalance this would create but the Fiver is convinced we'd all be dust come October or November, the earth scorched, with only three survivors roaming o'er the barren landscape: Govan's answer to King Lear, ranting into a hole in the ground; a mute, wild-eyed pundit, staring without blinking into a hole in the ground; and a tall, irritable figure standing in front of the pair of them, screaming in the style popularised by Klaus Kinski, demanding they take a look at his goddamn trouser arrangement, which he has balanced here on the platform of his hand for easy perusal, or to hell with them, for they are no better than pigs, worthless, spineless pigs.
  • (5) BBC footage showed Tebbutt wearing a green headscarf running towards a plane in a flat, barren landscape.
  • (6) Forced removals and dumping of millions of people into small, disconnected, barren, poor reserve areas, bereft of adequate medical, psychiatric and public health services (the 'final solution' of the 'native problem') causes widespread malnutrition, infectious and other diseases, and high mortality and mental-illness rates.
  • (7) There is no difference in the cyclicity of indices studied between pregnant and barren mares.
  • (8) Many cities have a history of hosting refugees; indeed, the typical image of a refugee dwelling – straight rows of nondescript tents set up on barren, faraway lands – is misleading.
  • (9) There were three groups: pregnant (P) ewes (n = 6) which each reared twin lambs, hormone-treated (H) ewes (n = 7) which were not pregnant and were given exogenous hormones (dexamethasone, oestradiol-17 beta, progesterone) for 37 days to induce udder development and milk production, and untreated barren (B) ewes (n = 6).
  • (10) Last year, Icelandic authorities rejected a Chinese billionaire's bid to turn land in the country's barren north into a holiday resort .
  • (11) It’s in these barren parts that the Edwards air force base is located, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, and where the test pilots celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff proved their mettle before going on to become America’s first astronauts.
  • (12) I grit my teeth as the trees hunker down smaller and smaller, then finally give up entirely, leaving us alone in a barren upland area where there is one large grey house partially obscured by torn curtains of freezing rain.
  • (13) 9 of 30 camels which were barren for a long period were found to be positive for C. fetus.
  • (14) Between 1982 and 1985, 1015 mares were evaluated using the following parameters: age, mare status (maiden, barren, lactating), Caslick index, Caslick operation, ovarian cycle, ovarian and follicular size, treatments (hCG and intrauterine infusions), number of ovulations after mating (184 mares), number of conceptuses present, dimensions of embryonic vesicles, and pregnancy status 45 days after mating.
  • (15) In 2007 the conservative senator, Bill Heffernan, accused the prime minister, then in opposition, of being unfit for leadership because she was "deliberately barren".
  • (16) All dogs from which necropsy samples were obtained harbored low numbers of adult female worms, some of which were barren.
  • (17) And no wonder, so seductively dystopian is its premise: that a species can be eradicated by altering the genetic code of males in captivity so that they will only be able to produce sterile offspring, then releasing them into the wild to mate with unsuspecting females, rendering the next generation barren.
  • (18) To analyse the junction point between the expression site and the inserted gene, these two barren regions were cloned and sequenced.
  • (19) He looks down dismissively at the guilty patch of barren earth.
  • (20) The presence of the nuclear plant is a beacon of employment in an otherwise barren jobs landscape.

Bleak


Definition:

  • (a.) Without color; pale; pallid.
  • (a.) Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.
  • (a.) Cold and cutting; cheerless; as, a bleak blast.
  • (a.) A small European river fish (Leuciscus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae; the blay.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "The results present a remarkably bleak portrait of life in the UK today and the shrinking opportunities faced by the bottom third of UK society," said the head of the project, Professor David Gordon of Bristol University.
  • (2) The study says: "The short-term outlook for the labour market looks bleak.
  • (3) He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad .
  • (4) This is training that predators rely upon,” she says in the book, “It is, perhaps, a form of gender-wide grooming.” For Caro, the opportunity of the book was to “place the blame where it lies,” she says, “squarely on the shoulders of those who use their power to exploit and damage others.” For all its bleakness, I drew comfort from the stories of the other contributors.
  • (5) Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others".
  • (6) He said the “bleak alternative” would have been to go through numerous probate courts while distant relatives of Gurlitt made their claims on the collection.
  • (7) After dismissing the ending of Revolutionary Road as "falsely bleak" and telling his audience that "there's something goofy about American literature since modernism came to an end", the celebrated author of Freedom and The Corrections moved on to social media .
  • (8) Bleak jokes and cartoons have been circulating for weeks in the anti-Assad camp on the theme of barrel bombs serving as ballot boxes.
  • (9) "I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak.
  • (10) It is to be hoped that pharmaceutical developments will improve the current bleak picture in which there are no proven treatments for ischaemic stroke or intracerebral haemorrhage.
  • (11) Next month Commonwealth leaders gather in Sri Lanka amid a bleak human rights situation as the country emerges from two decades of civil war that saw 40,000 civilians lose their lives .
  • (12) Things began to look bleak for the Saddlers when Chelsea extended their lead four minutes from the interval.
  • (13) The compelling television series The Returned , which concludes on Sunday on Channel 4, and several award-winning titles from French authors are earning fresh international plaudits for Gallic storytelling and proving that it is not only Norway, Sweden and Denmark that can offer a bleak outlook and a half-lit landscape.
  • (14) The alternative is to leave our young children facing a bleak future.
  • (15) Concomitant other distant metastases conferred a bleak prognosis.
  • (16) "I don't know why," he says, but it's something that didn't even happen at his lowest ebb: amid the bleakness of the early 70s, he somehow kept sporadically producing incredible songs: Til I Die, This Whole World, Sail On Sailor… There's always touring, however.
  • (17) The forecast is for one of the coldest winters in Syria for 100 years, with more than four million people displaced inside the country and an estimated two million who have fled into neighbouring countries, facing an increasingly bleak existence.
  • (18) The Reading group reaction to Bleak House has been overwhelmingly positive.
  • (19) The childish vulnerability she brings out in Sara balances out the visual bleakness of the film.
  • (20) The bleak outlook for patients with marrow necrosis based on early experience in adults with disseminated malignancy does not appear to apply to children with ALL.