(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.
Blear
Definition:
(v.) Dim or sore with water or rheum; -- said of the eyes.
(v.) Causing or caused by dimness of sight; dim.
(v. t.) To make somewhat sore or watery, as the eyes; to dim, or blur, as the sight. Figuratively: To obscure (mental or moral perception); to blind; to hoodwink.
Example Sentences:
(1) In fact, less flashy politicians such as Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears were the ones who made it to the top.
(2) For a while yesterday, Hazel Blears's selfishly-timed resignation with her rude "rock the boat" brooch send shudders of revulsion through some in the party.
(3) Two days later, another letter was dispatched to Blears, this time from Hank Dittmar, the chief executive of the foundation and an aide to the prince.
(4) Should the NEC move to support this, ministers such as the communities secretary, Hazel Blears, would be vulnerable.
(5) The Home Office minister Hazel Blears yesterday welcomed the report, and said: "We have always acknowledged that the CRB's initial performance was unacceptable.
(6) But axing Hazel Blears, the feisty communities secretary, would be more difficult.
(7) Intelligence and security committee report: the key findings Read more The leading Labour member on the ISC, Hazel Blears, said: “What we’ve found is that the way in which the agencies use the capabilities they have is authorised, lawful, necessary and proportionate.
(8) Earlier, Brown promised that Labour's national executive would deselect MPs who had broken the rules of parliament, describing the expenses claims of his communities secretary, Hazel Blears, and the Labour MP for Luton South, Margaret Moran, as "completely unacceptable" – his harshest condemnation yet.
(9) The Labour MP for Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle, said grassroots members were angry at the "treacherous behaviour" of senior figures such as former communities secretary Hazel Blears.
(10) "The aim of the event," he told Blears, "is to frame a positive way forward to respond to Gordon Brown's recent, and extremely timely, call for the construction of new ecotowns throughout Britain, using the model of HRH the Prince of Wales's development at Poundbury in Dorset."
(11) Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister and a figure close to Brown, was sceptical, as was Hazel Blears, a former party chair.
(12) Action already taken : Blears said she had done nothing wrong but paid back £13,000 in CGT.
(13) But without the private correspondence being released, there was no way the public could assess the extent and influence of Charles's lobbying, said Paul Richards, adviser to the former communities secretary Hazel Blears and health secretary Patricia Hewitt.
(14) I am assured that Blears, invited to write by the Observer as part of its European election coverage, did not intend her article to be taken as a "savaging" of Brown.
(15) His Blairite tag could be another boon to the rebel movement: it has been easy enough to dismiss Blears's resignation as being about expenses and bad timing, but Lord Mandelson is unlikely to be able to attack Purnell's motives.
(16) Blears rocked the party when she told Brown, at about 9.30am last Wednesday, that she wanted to leave the government for "personal reasons".
(17) Hazel Blears, the senior Labour member of parliament's intelligence and security committee , said it was right that a debate was under way in Britain over the powers of the security services, adding that the inquiry into agencies' powerful new capabilities would go wherever the evidence takes it.
(18) Howarth says it's almost as if Blears has read his speech in advance.
(19) "Hazel Blears wore a brooch saying, 'Rocking the boat'.
(20) However, Rifkind’s own recent privacy issues had made that tricky; empty-chairing himself might have set an awkward precedent that the prime minister would not have appreciated, so he settled for looking grumpy and morose while Hazel Blears ran the show.