(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.
Grim
Definition:
(Compar.) Of forbidding or fear-inspiring aspect; fierce; stern; surly; cruel; frightful; horrible.
Example Sentences:
(1) This is the grim Fury on a rainy winter morning in Cannes.
(2) The level of prescribing of opioid painkillers – Percocet in Geni’s case – has soared, and with it the incidence of addiction, and addiction’s grim best friend: fatal overdoses.
(3) Patients with anti-NC1 antibodies were characterised by linear immune deposits along the glomerular basement membrane and the clinical outcome was invariably grim.
(4) The Mail branded the deal "a grim day for all who value freedom" and, like the Times, accused David Cameron of crossing the Rubicon and threatening press freedom for the first time since newspapers were licensed in the 17th century.
(5) ARD TV showing grim-faced FDP cadres: could this be the first time they fall out of national parliament in 60 years?
(6) It has said a better productivity performance and rising North Sea oil revenues will make the budgetary position less grim.
(7) Shields accepted that the Irish appeared more inclined to send up their grim fiscal situation than go out and riot.
(8) Inside the Islamic State ‘capital’: no end in sight to its grim rule Read more The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia and an alliance of rebels known as the “Euphrates Volcano” – backed US-led coalition air strikes – have seized swaths of territory from Isis, including the strategic border town of Tal Abyad .
(9) Yet, if that flurry of form pepped optimism, the injuries and displays in recent friendlies have provided a grim reality check.
(10) The dark, luxury air in the silent bedrooms of empty riverside apartments, their identical curving blocks clustered in threes and fours, grim and silent as gill slits, will be theirs.
(11) Chinese media and bloggers published images of three young children in blue school uniforms lying dead on the pavement – a grim echo of the high casualty rate at poorly constructed schools in Sichuan in 2008, when a bigger quake killed 87,000 people.
(12) The BCC survey represents a turnround from the end of last year, when it was predicting stagflation – a grim combination of zero growth and inflation.
(13) The human rights organisation, which has produced a series of in-depth reports detailing the grim working conditions of many of the 1.5 million migrant labourers engaged in a huge construction boom, said “little has changed in law, policy and practice” since the government promised limited reforms 12 months ago.
(14) Carcinoma of unknown histogenesis or primary site is an increasingly recognized syndrome regarded by most physicians as having a grim prognosis.
(15) "There are times when a swingeing sentence can act as a deterrent", as the judge at the trial was grimly to pronounce.
(16) The footage beamed back from the liberated districts of Ramadi is grim: a ghost town littered with debris and smashed concrete, destroyed storefronts, plumes of smoke, the sound of gunfire piercing the air as Iraqi soldiers speak on camera.
(17) It was my shortcomings as coach that caused this result,” said a grim-faced South Korea manager, Hong Myung-bo, who spent most of the post-match press-conference scratching his nose in apparent distress and deflecting comments about whether he would stay on as manager until next year’s Asian Cup.
(18) After grim news on the recession, at least one thing should become clearer: going back to where we were is no longer an option.
(19) While deplorable and to a degree self-defeating, this insouciant defiance also makes a grim kind of sense, both historically and reinforced by recent events.
(20) The entity carries a grim visual prognosis, as all ten eyes initially had no perception of light; improvement to light perception occurred in one instance.