What's the difference between barren and drab?

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.

Drab


Definition:

  • (n.) A low, sluttish woman.
  • (n.) A lewd wench; a strumpet.
  • (n.) A wooden box, used in salt works for holding the salt when taken out of the boiling pans.
  • (v. i.) To associate with strumpets; to wench.
  • (n.) A kind of thick woolen cloth of a dun, or dull brownish yellow, or dull gray, color; -- called also drabcloth.
  • (n.) A dull brownish yellow or dull gray color.
  • (a.) Of a color between gray and brown.
  • (n.) A drab color.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Mendl's candy colours contrast sharply with the gothic garb of our hero's enemies and the greys of the prison uniforms – as well as scenes showing the hotel later, in the 1960s, its opulence lost beneath a drab communist refurb.
  • (2) And it will almost certainly continue arriving in dribs and drabs, based on the Sea Dragon's observations.
  • (3) While Klimt was creating modern art there, Hitler was going to the opera to hear Wagner (conducted by the modernist Gustav Mahler), and soon eking a living painting drab topographic scenes.
  • (4) The most visible sign of this is the arrival each day, when parliament is in session in its lavish, marble-decked halls in the new capital of Naypyidaw , of scores of officers, natty in their freshly pressed olive drab.
  • (5) Here was a woman, "dismal, drab, embarrassing," sodden with "self-pity," who in the Golden Notebook had single-handedly set back the women's movement "a good long way".
  • (6) Inside, photographs of these often drab exteriors are contrasted with the vibrantly colourful images of the interiors.
  • (7) It is incredible the bombers did not have tickets but, regardless, they would not have got through the body searches at the gates.” Pavlovic and his wife, Ljiljana, had been selling scarves outside the arena prior to kick-off but, despite having tickets for the match, ambled down towards McDonald’s where they had parked in Impasse de la Cokerie, a drab cul de sac between characterless office blocks, to meet his cousin and her husband.
  • (8) Second half: Barcelona's players have been ready to start the second half for several minutes, while Inter's are emerging from the tunnel in dribs and drabs.
  • (9) A fter five years in the job of chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw will deliver his final annual general report as head of Ofsted on Thursday morning – possibly to his own regret and almost certainly to the regret of education journalists, for whom life can sometimes be a little drab.
  • (10) Photograph: John Brunton Situated smack on the "strada del vino", it is easy to drive straight past this drab-looking tratttoria.
  • (11) The 6.6-kilobase DNA fragment expressed five polypeptides with molecular masses of 15.5, 5, 18, 90, and 32 kilodaltons encoded by the draA, draB, draC, draD, and draE genes, respectively.
  • (12) On Monday, Gao began the latest phase of her crusade, travelling to a drab five-storey courthouse in western Beijing with about a dozen other relatives to file a lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines before a legal deadline that coincides with the disaster’s two-year anniversary.
  • (13) On the surface, the subject could not have been more drab.
  • (14) Slovakia v Paraguay in Bloem: another drab spectacle with the Slovakians managing to run around aimlessly for 90 minutes.
  • (15) And that's absolutely the right, drab clothing to reach for as the post-Leveson debate enters a new round.
  • (16) Despite all the dribs and drabs of innovation in the ocean of old-media rules, we're beginning to see a kind of ideal on the horizon.
  • (17) Anything positive would stand out against what's been a pretty drab backdrop so far.
  • (18) Yet sometimes a little decay here and there, some graffiti, flyers posted on walls and lampposts, can add liveliness to what would otherwise be a drab urban experience.
  • (19) High up in the National Theatre, Patrick Marber is huddled in the corner of a small, drab room.
  • (20) An AQI reading of 300 blots out the sun, smothering the city in drab uniformity.