(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.
Murky
Definition:
(superl.) Dark; obscure; gloomy.
Example Sentences:
(1) As Russian companies Polymetal, Polyus Gold and Evraz race to join Eurasian Natural Resources as FTSE100 companies, despite their murky practices, because of London's incredibly lax listing requirements, one future scenario is becoming clearer.
(2) The NYT article further shines further light into this murky affair, in which both News International and the Metropolitan Police have so far been evasive, to say the least."
(3) In another example, Colorado legislators this month had to pass a new state law to allow for a cannabis co-operative credit union that would let marijuana businesses open bank accounts and escape the murky world of cash-only transactions.
(4) "The more questions that are raised about this murky business the more important it becomes to investigate further, including who outside the CQC was aware, and what they did," Woodcock said.
(5) Why won’t he help?” His 1966 Macbeth, with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret , at the Royal Court, had pushed Shakespeare’s murky tragedy into unsparing white light, but Gaskill’s unscrubbed classics seemed less revelatory in later years.
(6) She set up camp on her first floor and even when the murky water began to climb the stairs was determined to stay.
(7) The Kremlin insists that "radicals", including "anti-Semites, fascists and ultra-nationalists" staged a coup in Kiev – with murky western backing – and now continue to destabilize Ukraine.
(8) The prime minister told the Sun he had been left frustrated by the experience in 2010, which he had previously described as “murky”.
(9) Murky crime drama Shetland (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1) returns this week for a second series, revealing Shetland as the most eerie – and overcast – location on Earth.
(10) How can free expression and the yearning for a private life be protected in this murky arena of a gossip free-for-all?
(11) The FPC has neither, so it risks just going quack- quack on a murky pond," he said.
(12) Although I've learned to appreciate the grim beauty of murkiness, the washrag skies and mud so jealous it clings to every step, this emerald vision in the monochrome gloom is startling.
(13) Instead of talking to the demonstrators – a diverse and previously non-political bunch – he has blamed the protests on a murky foreign conspiracy.
(14) Earlier this year we wrote about Gnod , Salford's finest purveyors of ambient sludge, prog-metal and murky motorik psych-drone space-rock.
(15) But everything about such attacks is murky; finding the perpetrators is difficult if not impossible, as the architecture of the internet allows for hackers to mask their attack through unwitting users and anonymisation software.
(16) Piles of old nuclear reactor parts and decaying fuel rods, much of them of unknown provenance and age, line the murky, radioactive waters of the cooling pond in the centre of B30.
(17) Three issues are distinguished in an attempt to clarify a murky debate: (a) the utility of probabilistic methods in data reduction, (b) the value of models that assume indeterminacy, and (c) the validity of the inference that the nervous system is largely indeterministic at the neuronal level.
(18) In a world of choice and instant access to information, the murky, semi-translucent process of party politics that is plagued by lies, corruption and plastic promises is something most of us steer clear of.
(19) Nor is it just a matter of murky Murdoch practices.
(20) John Simm plays a grizzled ex-cop from LA living in the Pacific north-west, who, when his wife (Mira Sorvino) goes missing, finds himself hurled into a mysterious, murky world.