(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.
Gaunt
Definition:
(a.) Attenuated, as with fasting or suffering; lean; meager; pinched and grim.
Example Sentences:
(1) On a snowless but chilly afternoon early in the Moscow winter, a 29-year-old man with a gaunt, emaciated face stepped on to the vast expanse of Red Square.
(2) "I am an old lady, and have many grandchildren," she says, pointing to the gaunt, grubby faces baking around her in the tent.
(3) This gaunt, haunting visage (which, in the story, turned out to belong to a deliberately frightening dummy) appeared in Star Trek's end credits almost every week, and was guaranteed to scare the shit out of me whenever it did so.
(4) Facebook Twitter Pinterest He commands the screen even when silent, his pain flitting across that gaunt, ravaged face … Sean Bean in Broken.
(5) In March, Paul Nuttalls called for Johnny and the Baptists to be banned from any venue receiving public subsidy – basically everywhere – for doing a funny song about the Ukips, even though the same places host Jim Davidson, Roy Chubby Brown, John Gaunt and Top Gear; the same week Farage defended the booking of an old-school non-PC comic at the Ukips’ conference saying: “Let people tell their jokes!
(6) Whoops and cheers turned to screams of delight as a gaunt-looking figure mounted the steps and slowly approached the microphone.
(7) It showed a woman of mournfully beautiful gauntness, jacket draped over her shoulder.
(8) Or maybe John of Gaunt had it right: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” Main illustration by Christophe Gowans • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread , or sign up to the long read weekly email here This article was amended on 21 June 2016.
(9) Furthermore Orange RN which by azo reduction yields ANSA (and aniline) induce the same effect in pigs (Olsen et al., 1973) but not in rats (Gaunt et al., 1971).
(10) Perhaps it is the classically gaunt face, or maybe it is the aquiline nose, but he looks exactly like Don Quixote.
(11) A gaunt-looking Shalit told Egyptian TV that he hoped the deal would promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians and also spoke of his desire to see freedom for thousands of others Palestinians still held by Israel .
(12) Before the attack for which I was arrested, no one in Balochistan knew I had disappeared,” he said, dressed in a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, drinking a coffee with a gaunt look in his eyes as he nervously twisted a rolled up cigarette in his hand.
(13) He was gaunt and frail, living from one morphine dose to the next.
(14) At my father's bedside, I learned what death looks like Read more For many Glaswegians, Possilpark has a reputation, one resented deeply by its residents, built on images of drug addicts and alcoholics clustered on street corners, of gaunt men and women with hardened, ruined faces queuing outside pharmacies at 7.30am for their methadone handouts.
(15) The son of a police officer, Gaunt is hailed as "the monster who roars for coppers" on the website of the Metropolitan police federation .
(16) Abandoned farms dot the landscape: gaunt timber-framed skeletons, their owners given up and gone to California or Seattle.
(17) Bin Laden appeared gaunt and apparently wounded in a video.
(18) The Everton manager, who looks gaunt and shattered after a dreadful festive period, conceded: “We are still in a very bad run and need to turn it around.
(19) They criticise the decision to fund a £15,000-a-month contract with the Gaunt Brothers, a PR company, to use "blitzkrieg" and "guerrilla" tactics was a major error that damaged the Fed's reputation.
(20) It shows Litvinenko gaunt and emaciated on his hospital bed, and is the last image of him alive, the inquiry heard.