(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.
Stark
Definition:
(n.) Stiff; rigid.
(n.) Complete; absolute; full; perfect; entire.
(n.) Strong; vigorous; powerful.
(n.) Severe; violent; fierce.
(n.) Mere; sheer; gross; entire; downright.
(adv.) Wholly; entirely; absolutely; quite; as, stark mind.
(v. t.) To stiffen.
Example Sentences:
(1) World leaders must reach a historic agreement to fight climate change and poverty at coming talks in Paris, facing the stark choice to either “improve or destroy the environment”, Pope Francis said in Africa on Thursday.
(2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest No shake: Donald Trump snubs Angela Merkel during photo op The piece of pantomime was in stark contrast to the visit of Theresa May in January.
(3) But as a former Eurocrat, he is well-versed in the weaknesses and believes it is right to highlight them in stark language.
(4) These achievements, and faults, will find stark contrast with Trump’s administration; certainly Trump’s nominations for key positions in his cabinet that relate to climate change have prompted alarm by experts and campaigners.
(5) An ethnic breakdown of other opinion-formers, from book reviewers to theatre critics, would be just as stark.
(6) Paul*, from Essex, a father of two daughters, has experienced those starkly differing standards.
(7) Friends of the Earth's executive director, Andy Atkins, said: "We can't continue to ignore the stark warnings of the catastrophic consequences of climate change on the lives and livelihoods of people across the planet.
(8) She went on to deliver a stark warning that leaving the single market would deter international investors from Britain and lead major companies to question whether they should relocate to mainland Europe.
(9) This was in stark contrast to my comprehensive school.
(10) Their differences highlight Northern Ireland’s often stark dichotomy between religious-based social conservatism and secular progressive liberalism.
(11) By global city standards even those are quite clean and orderly, but compared with the rest of the city they offer a stark contrast.
(12) Dig deeper into the funding numbers – the real story of national politics in the post Citizens United age – and the Tea Party realignment of the GOP stands out yet more starkly.
(13) The inequalities that have been allowed to emerge in this one street are so stark they recall an era as long past as the period of its houses.
(14) A glance at today's Sun provides a stark reminder that constitutional reform is no way to win easy plaudits from the papers that most voters read.
(15) Although the Kyoto agreement only measures production, the stark difference in the figures highlights a key controversy in negotiations about a new treaty – which will continue at a big UN meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in December : some developing countries, such as China, argue they should not be held responsible for emissions generated by consumption in rich nations.
(16) It is a stark contrast to expectations before the vote to leave the EU, when the next move in interest rates was seen as likely to be upwards.
(17) The next few days may well determine whether, this time, such loyalty will be in vain; but, while yearning for a clarion call and what was described as "vision" in this paper's leading article yesterday, I need to pose some pretty stark questions to Guardian readers.
(18) They included Lena Heady (Queen Cersei Lannister), Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Conleth Hill (Lord Varys), Rose Leslie (Ygritte), 17-year-old Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) and 18-year-old Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark).
(19) The orderly village of Agulodiek in Ethiopia's western Gambella region stands in stark contrast to Elay, a settlement 5km west of Gambella town, where collapsed straw huts strewn with cracked clay pots lie among a tangle of bushes.
(20) The next three years of negotiations on the treaty will be the hardest in the 20-year history of climate change talks because the world has changed enormously since 1992, when the UN convention on climate change was signed, and 1997, when the Kyoto protocol enshrined a stark division between developed countries – which were required to cut emissions – and developing countries, which were not.