(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.
Glum
Definition:
(n.) Sullenness.
(a.) Moody; silent; sullen.
(v. i.) To look sullen; to be of a sour countenance; to be glum.
Example Sentences:
(1) "We don't have any reason to, to be honest," he says, with a touch of glumness.
(2) The old, optimistic growth forecasts were torn up, replaced by the glum admission that this year the economy will have shrunk by 0.1%.
(3) But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.
(4) The AU delegation - made up of South Africa , Uganda, Mauritania, Congo-Brazzaville and Mali - left the talks looking glum, without making a public comment and to the derisive shouts of the protesters outside the hotel.
(5) We can see why they’re glum, but it’s not going to be a challenge for Private Eye to get a cover page joke out of it.
(6) They have glumly predicted precisely that outcome for some time.
(7) Sandwiched on a panel between the mayors of Los Angeles, Copenhagen, New York, and Johannesburg, the most rapidly converted man in the city struck out at the glums.
(8) (As glum centrists often observe: “He beat us twice.”) The Labour leader might not have taken his party to victory, but he has earned the right to fight again.
(9) Addressing a glum group of SPD supporters in Berlin, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the outgoing foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor, said it was a "bitter day for German social democracy".
(10) At times, Sarkozy had seemed tired and glum on the campaign trail.
(11) The mood in No 10 grew extremely glum as a steady drip of areas were declaring two points below their own predictions.
(12) I had expected the American guests to be in a state of hysteria, but apart from a few glumly watching CNN in the bar, hotel life went on as usual.
(13) Conventional understanding of politics assumes that that kind of rational argument is devastating: if you amass the historical data and the foreign examples, point to defeat after defeat for Corbynist programmes or Sanders-like candidates, surely their supporters will glumly lower their placards and come to their senses.
(14) I felt the same way I would if I went to a play and sat through an hour of about 50 actors filing onto the stage one by one and staring at me glumly in turn before any actual business resulted.
(15) He used to mock me for it, and see it as part of my characteristic glumness, which was such a contrast to his relentless enthusiasm.
(16) I can’t make decisions for myself”, she declares glumly.
(17) Prisoners' breath catches in clouds while they glumly circuit the courtyard.
(18) It’s melancholy because it rests on the glum admission that these two peoples, both asserting their right to self-determination, are unable to determine their own futures.
(19) Some contrasted his eloquence with Zuma, who looked glum each time his face was shown and roundly booed.
(20) The study's findings may be skewed by Dutch psychologists spending summers doing glum research rather than catching rays.