(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.
Bleat
Definition:
(v. i.) To make the noise of, or one like that of, a sheep; to cry like a sheep or calf.
(n.) A plaintive cry of, or like that of, a sheep.
Example Sentences:
(1) Using tonal stimuli based on the nonspeech stimuli of Mattingly et al., we found that subjects, with appropriate practice, could classify nonspeech chirp, short bleat, and bleat continua with boundaries equivalent to the syllable place continuum of Mattingly et al.
(2) There is no point in bleating about it,” Ritchie said.
(3) In a second experiment the bleats of 23 pregnant ewes were recorded; their lambs were taken at birth and tested with the sound of either their own mother's bleats, or with bleats from an alien ewe.
(4) With its bleating goats and vegetable patches, the centre is an oasis of rural tranquillity compared with the hustle and bustle of Goma down the road.
(5) Why is it acceptable to denigrate anything Catholic but bleat tolerance about every other religion?
(6) Worse for Greece, many of the suits in Brussels believe that for all the bleating, it is a wealthy country that only need embark on some redistribution of its own to solve much of its poverty.
(7) If the 13-year legal battle over Firing Zone 918 ends in Israel's favour, the bleat of goats will be replaced by the crack of assault rifles and the villagers will be moved into a nearby town.
(8) "But it's just Heartbeat with an umbilical hernia," bleat the unbelievers, pinching their delicate nosey-woses at the sight of steaming prolapses and swatting away the cuddles and godliness with their Game Of Thrones box sets.
(9) Best paragraph: “Many bleated they had nothing to hide and thus have nothing to fear during the Obama (and Bush) administration, out of trust for a president or fear of terror.
(10) I don’t think anyone can bleat if they don’t act.
(11) Bogus claims about “sovereignty”, and ill-judged bleating about “Brussels”, influenced many people I met, even before we were presented with the results.
(12) As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.
(13) Significantly more stimulated ewes licked the lamb and emitted low-pitched bleats in a 30-min test.
(14) Public corporations are like nation states in one respect, namely that while they may bleat (or boast) about their "values", in the end they are driven only by their national or corporate interests – which in practice means the interests of shareholders.
(15) Experts are not certain at this stage if Tian Tian (left) is pregnant, but the latest hormone tests are said to show positive signs and she is being closely watched for signs of labour such as restless behaviour and bleating.
(16) There is broad agreement that this is a London problem and only bleating metropolitan elites are troubled by it.
(17) So isn't he merely bleating about the treatment he dishes out to others?
(18) And there is a strong feeling that we should do over the Bleating Broadcasting Corporation.
(19) "Rather than just bleat about it, I think we should just do something about it … I believe in the territory, I love the territory," he said, standing next to his candidate for the marginal seat of Solomon, Luke Gosling.
(20) Trump’s supporters, like Brexit supporters before them, will say that these are merely the bleatings of the sore losers – the Remoaners, the Grimtons, or whatever portmanteau is conceived next.