(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.
Cheerless
Definition:
(a.) Without joy, gladness, or comfort.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Countless generations of girls were sentenced to lives lacking in sexual pleasure or fulfilment and cheerless marriages."
(2) But is the dilemma posed here in this ugly, cheerless Bohemia supposed to be typical?
(3) But for most homeowners, especially those who have come to view their home as a form of pension, the outlook is cheerless.
(4) And of course the authorities are incensed, affirming once again that old adage: there is only one thing more cheerless than a Magi with a severed head – a local bureaucrat armed with zoning laws.
(5) "It was pitiable to see these poor people struggling with their adversity, and to think of the cheerless night they must spend amid their sodden surroundings," the Eastern Daily Press wrote.
(6) Dedicated websites flog dried food, gas masks and other cheerless items.
(7) They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.
(8) If it is possible to whimper at the volume of a bang, then that is how this decade is ending on the big screen: with two high-profile, high-budget movies about the end of the world: Roland Emmerich's cheerfully silly 2012, and John Hillcoat's cheerlessly serious The Road , which arrive with a good deal of commentary to the effect that these movies typify the zeitgeist of the decade.
(9) Like a rich country fruit cake, Kidnapped is seasoned throughout with handfuls of dialect words, "ain" (one), "bairn" (child), "blae" (cheerless), "chield" (fellow), "drammach" (raw oatmeal), "fash" (bother), "muckle" (big), "siller" (money), "unco" (extremely) , "wheesht!"
(10) The Telegraph, meanwhile, said the film was "a special class of awful" while The Mirror labelled it "cheap and cheerless".
(11) The changes of basic mood, however, which are characteristic of depression, such as cheerlessness and apathy, are the dopamine of antidepressive medication; only these drugs can re-establish the biochemical balance to a large extent.
(12) As the cheerless skies and grim economy sap all will to return to work, take heart that even on a trip to Mars , it is hard to get out of bed in the morning.
(13) And will amateur property developers, who, thanks to Sarah Beeny and Kirstie Allsopp's television programmes, have been nurturing nauseating dreams of squeezing vast profits from cheap and cheerless accommodation, come hideously unstuck?
(14) Anyone who doesn't think that if they could just have her in their bedroom at seven o'clock on a Friday night, in control of the white wine, the Elnett and the minicab booking, that life would somehow never be cheerless again?
(15) Let me close with Sir William Osler's metaphor: How common the experience to enter a cold cheerless room in which the fire in the grate has died down, not from lack of coal, not because the coal was not alight, but the bits, large and small, falling away from each other have gradually become dark and cold.