(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.
Blight
Definition:
(v. t.) To affect with blight; to blast; to prevent the growth and fertility of.
(v. t.) Hence: To destroy the happiness of; to ruin; to mar essentially; to frustrate; as, to blight one's prospects.
(v. i.) To be affected by blight; to blast; as, this vine never blights.
(n.) Mildew; decay; anything nipping or blasting; -- applied as a general name to various injuries or diseases of plants, causing the whole or a part to wither, whether occasioned by insects, fungi, or atmospheric influences.
(n.) The act of blighting, or the state of being blighted; a withering or mildewing, or a stoppage of growth in the whole or a part of a plant, etc.
(n.) That which frustrates one's plans or withers one's hopes; that which impairs or destroys.
(n.) A downy species of aphis, or plant louse, destructive to fruit trees, infesting both the roots and branches; -- also applied to several other injurious insects.
(n.) A rashlike eruption on the human skin.
Example Sentences:
(1) Blight responded with a hypothetical, telling Ludlam if the ASD asked a foreign agency to get material about Australian citizens it could not access under Australian law, the IGIS would know about it and flag it in its annual report.
(2) The environment secretary, Liz Truss , has stripped farmers of subsidies for solar farms, saying they are a “blight” that was pushing food production overseas.
(3) Indeed, while people might be annoyed or alarmed at the idea of being given placebos, medics probably wouldn't need to were it not for the modern blight of the Worried Well clogging up consulting rooms.
(4) Isolates of Helminthosporium maydis from blighted corn were tested for toxicity in mice, rats, swine, rabbits, microorganisms, and tissue culture.
(5) "For families across the UK who are income-poor, but more than that, whose lives are blighted by worklessness, educational failure, family breakdown, problem debt and poor health, as well as other problems, giving them an extra pound – say through increased benefits – will not address the reason they find themselves in difficulty in the first place."
(6) The England international, who has made 18 appearances in a season blighted by a number of fitness problems, has flown to the US to see Dr Peter Asnis, an orthopaedic surgeon connected to Fenway Sports Group’s other major acquisition, the Boston Red Sox, in an attempt to solve his hip injury.
(7) The disadvantaging of modern languages candidates in school examinations has been blighting the subject at all levels, and will continue to do so until the unfair grading is addressed effectively.
(8) But the bumper year was somewhat blighted in the UK as Google was one of a number of multinational companies, including Amazon and Starbucks, that came under fire from MPs over their tax arrangements .
(9) In both cases, her coaching seems to have paid off, at least for a time: those GOP lawmakers walked into decidedly fewer self-sabotaging boobytraps in the election cycle following the 2013 retreat at which she spoke, and Pence’s strong performance at the RNC last month was a bright spot in an otherwise blighted convention.
(10) 8, a super Chinese rice cultivar with high productivity, good quality and high resistance to both bacterial blight and blast.
(11) Puts another swath of west London directly under a flight path, and blights thousands more.
(12) A viral double-stranded (ds)RNA associated with reduced virulence (hypovirulence) and the accompanying biological control of the chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, was shown recently to contain two contiguous coding domains designated ORF A and ORF B.
(13) We evaluated the differences between this group and those patients presenting either with a blighted ovum or beyond the first trimester, as well as the outcome of those patients with spotting early in gestation.
(14) And although in a few cases Pathfinder entailed the demolition of housing in genuinely blighted areas, and though there's no doubt that northern cities were depopulated from their mid-20th century heights, market correction was always the rationale.
(15) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Part of an outer structure of a blighted home stands along Alter Road in Detroit.
(16) According to them the diagnosis of blighted ovum and missed abortion seems to be confirmed when an "empty sac" is larger than 20 mm, or the absence of heart motion is detected in an embrio greater than 10 mm, without repeated scan.
(17) It soon emerged that the City Planning Commission had already, surreptitiously, designated the area as blighted.
(18) We have synthesized and mapped a cDNA library representing the one major dsRNA element associated with hypovirulence in strain NB58 of the chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectira (=Endothia) parasitica, which was isolated from recovering chestnut trees in New Jersey, U.S.A.
(19) This article reports the initiation of a joint hospital-school district child protection committee in an urban setting of socio-economic blight.
(20) The rail network remains blighted by the unnecessary complexities of the framework established under the privatisation he rightly criticises.