What's the difference between bleak and dull?

Bleak


Definition:

  • (a.) Without color; pale; pallid.
  • (a.) Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.
  • (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.

Dull


Definition:

  • (superl.) Slow of understanding; wanting readiness of apprehension; stupid; doltish; blockish.
  • (superl.) Slow in action; sluggish; unready; awkward.
  • (superl.) Insensible; unfeeling.
  • (superl.) Not keen in edge or point; lacking sharpness; blunt.
  • (superl.) Not bright or clear to the eye; wanting in liveliness of color or luster; not vivid; obscure; dim; as, a dull fire or lamp; a dull red or yellow; a dull mirror.
  • (superl.) Heavy; gross; cloggy; insensible; spiritless; lifeless; inert.
  • (superl.) Furnishing little delight, spirit, or variety; uninteresting; tedious; cheerless; gloomy; melancholy; depressing; as, a dull story or sermon; a dull occupation or period; hence, cloudy; overcast; as, a dull day.
  • (v. t.) To deprive of sharpness of edge or point.
  • (v. t.) To make dull, stupid, or sluggish; to stupefy, as the senses, the feelings, the perceptions, and the like.
  • (v. t.) To render dim or obscure; to sully; to tarnish.
  • (v. t.) To deprive of liveliness or activity; to render heavy; to make inert; to depress; to weary; to sadden.
  • (v. i.) To become dull or stupid.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain," Wallace wrote at one point, "because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."
  • (2) Similar systems were put in place at Dulles outside Washington DC, Newark and Chicago airports on Thursday.
  • (3) The soft, dull, malacic appearance of the center results from lack of a true surface layer of tangential collagen fibers.
  • (4) Here I am in Los Angeles being paid $30,000 to do next to nothing and still I'm finding life rather dull.
  • (5) A significant proportion of splenic B cells reacted with these mAb, although lower number (one-log less) than peritoneal B cells and a small proportion of H7dull+ splenic B cells seems to be Ly-1(CD5)dull+, 1 of 200 splenic B cells responded to IL-5 for IgM production.
  • (6) A 58-year-old man complained of dull left lower quadrant pain and constipation.
  • (7) They will begin next week at Liberty airport in Newark, New Jersey; Dulles, outside Washington DC; Chicago O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.
  • (8) At both observations, crowns were rated on 5-point Likert scales for outline form, porosity, smoothness, reflectance, texture, dullness, defects, and general esthetic appearances.
  • (9) On the other hand AMH2 showed the dull-positive reaction with some monocytes and pleural exudate cells among above-mentioned cells.
  • (10) Britain’s Got Talent review – Simon Cowell is looking like Caligula after a dull day at the Coliseum Read more The show, won last year by boy band Collabro, began eight years ago with 4.9 million viewers, rising to 8.8 million for its second series launch before hitting the 10 million mark for the first time in 2009 with 10.3 million.
  • (11) Disseminated annular psoriasiform lesions developed over a period of 2 months in a 48-year-old man with no preceding psoriatic history of drug intake, being accompanied by general dullness and arthralgia.
  • (12) 3) At the severe stage, pain and dullness at the back, numbness at arms and hands, hand coldness, sleep disturbance etc.
  • (13) One month after surgery, she complained of swelling and a dull pain in the right leg without cardiorespiratory symptoms.
  • (14) Black-hair follicular dysplasia in dogs of mixed breeding was delineated by hypotrichosis and dullness of most black regions of the coat.
  • (15) Endoscopic examination disclosed an almost roundish, smooth-surfaced, flat and dull red area corresponding to IIc (slightly depressed type).
  • (16) Their surface phenotype was Thy-1+(dull), Ly-1.2+(dull), Lyt-2-, L3T4-, 9F3+, and 3A1+, which is consistent with that found in intact lpr mice.
  • (17) The engines, gearboxes and even the doors now have a complexity that sees them constructed elsewhere, but the transformation on this line of the dull sheen of aluminium parts into a moving vehicle at the other end is still something to behold.
  • (18) Flow cytometry showed three types of trophozoite staining by mAb: (i) bright staining of greater than 90% of trophozoites, with aggregation of the organisms; (ii) bright staining of approximately 90% of trophozoites, with little or no aggregation; (iii) dull staining of approximately 20% of trophozoites, without aggregation.
  • (19) The percentage of dull CD8+CD11b+ cells (natural killer cells) among TG-2 cells was lower than that in peripheral blood, but there was no significant difference in bright CD8+CD11b+ cells (suppressor-effector T cells) between thyroid glands and peripheral blood.
  • (20) It was filed in my mind as a pretty but dull destination, full of pensioners on package deals and cruises.