What's the difference between cheerless and dreary?

Cheerless


Definition:

  • (a.) Without joy, gladness, or comfort.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Countless generations of girls were sentenced to lives lacking in sexual pleasure or fulfilment and cheerless marriages."
  • (2) But is the dilemma posed here in this ugly, cheerless Bohemia supposed to be typical?
  • (3) But for most homeowners, especially those who have come to view their home as a form of pension, the outlook is cheerless.
  • (4) And of course the authorities are incensed, affirming once again that old adage: there is only one thing more cheerless than a Magi with a severed head – a local bureaucrat armed with zoning laws.
  • (5) "It was pitiable to see these poor people struggling with their adversity, and to think of the cheerless night they must spend amid their sodden surroundings," the Eastern Daily Press wrote.
  • (6) Dedicated websites flog dried food, gas masks and other cheerless items.
  • (7) They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.
  • (8) If it is possible to whimper at the volume of a bang, then that is how this decade is ending on the big screen: with two high-profile, high-budget movies about the end of the world: Roland Emmerich's cheerfully silly 2012, and John Hillcoat's cheerlessly serious The Road , which arrive with a good deal of commentary to the effect that these movies typify the zeitgeist of the decade.
  • (9) Like a rich country fruit cake, Kidnapped is seasoned throughout with handfuls of dialect words, "ain" (one), "bairn" (child), "blae" (cheerless), "chield" (fellow), "drammach" (raw oatmeal), "fash" (bother), "muckle" (big), "siller" (money), "unco" (extremely) , "wheesht!"
  • (10) The Telegraph, meanwhile, said the film was "a special class of awful" while The Mirror labelled it "cheap and cheerless".
  • (11) The changes of basic mood, however, which are characteristic of depression, such as cheerlessness and apathy, are the dopamine of antidepressive medication; only these drugs can re-establish the biochemical balance to a large extent.
  • (12) As the cheerless skies and grim economy sap all will to return to work, take heart that even on a trip to Mars , it is hard to get out of bed in the morning.
  • (13) And will amateur property developers, who, thanks to Sarah Beeny and Kirstie Allsopp's television programmes, have been nurturing nauseating dreams of squeezing vast profits from cheap and cheerless accommodation, come hideously unstuck?
  • (14) Anyone who doesn't think that if they could just have her in their bedroom at seven o'clock on a Friday night, in control of the white wine, the Elnett and the minicab booking, that life would somehow never be cheerless again?
  • (15) Let me close with Sir William Osler's metaphor: How common the experience to enter a cold cheerless room in which the fire in the grate has died down, not from lack of coal, not because the coal was not alight, but the bits, large and small, falling away from each other have gradually become dark and cold.

Dreary


Definition:

  • (superl.) Sorrowful; distressful.
  • (superl.) Exciting cheerless sensations, feelings, or associations; comfortless; dismal; gloomy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) KSmythe Make a splash in the cold: Bergen, Norway Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Getty Images Bergen, even when the fjords are too wet and dreary to visit, is still a relaxing destination for a winter break in Norway.
  • (2) The answer, apparently, is comedian Eddie Izzard , along with a whole fleet of red-carpet English entertainers , who are to be driven north to bring shine and glee to the rather dreary Project Fear .
  • (3) A ll the leaves are brown and the sky is grey as I leave dreary Britain for my date with celebrity destiny … in Los Angeles, California.
  • (4) A match of this nature calls into question the whole notion of ambition when it does no more than lead to an encounter as dreary as it was energetic.
  • (5) Design and technology is struggling to shake off a dreary image and is lumbered with a perception that it is secondary to so-called academic subjects.
  • (6) Would she be interested in portraying the life of Mrs David - who brought the first glint of the Mediterranean to middle-class kitchens in the dreary 1950s?
  • (7) Contrary to popular opinion, it has not been the vuvuzelas ruining the World Cup, but the dreary football.
  • (8) Newspapers in England find it notoriously difficult to captivate their readers in the run-up to hard sells such as a dreary home qualifier against the likes of Slovenia, so how incredibly lucky it is for editors that several Premier League clubs have chosen today to reveal a series of sensational transfer plots!
  • (9) "Its strength is its sheer exuberance, the richness and the colours, on a rather dreary January day it makes you feel so optimistic," said Jim Bruce, an artist from London, emerging from the glass exit doors of the Hockney rooms.
  • (10) Comparisons between present-day China and the soulless, dreary totalitarian socialist state immortalised in Orwell's masterpiece are difficult to sustain after seeing clutch after clutch of Chinese teenagers, dressed in the latest quasi-Japanophile fashion, walk down a mobbed Beijing pedestrian shopping arcade nibbling at bouquets of candy floss and prattling on as if the phrase "commodity fetishism" had never crossed their young lips.
  • (11) These are things that might make me as happy as news that the wonderful Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are to take over from the increasingly dreary Ricky Gervais as hosts of the Golden Globes – but not by much.
  • (12) Rowe points out that there is an especially dreary possible outcome to the contest, namely that "they could both lose and comfort each other".
  • (13) If the beginning of the end of Slobodan Milosevic's bloody reign came anywhere, it was not in the dreary corridors of power, nor in the cramped offices of the Yugoslav electoral commission which tried to steal last month's elections, but under the vast arc lights of Kolubara where Milosevic made his most serious mistake, misinterpreting the mood of a group of workers he had relied on throughout his regime.
  • (14) The book was derided as “ buttoned-up ,” “ safe and unchallenging ” and “ boring and dreary .” Nobody, so far, is saying that about the campaign.
  • (15) This sad and dreary episode, when Finnish soldiers were compelled to fight their former comrades-in-arms, is, for example, the subject of Antti Tuuri's bestselling novel of 2012, Rauta-antura (Iron-shod).
  • (16) The sound of the great orchestras contrasted so forcibly with our little band of seven in the studio that it came as a revelation of what the future of broadcasting might be …” As for the listeners: “Many people imagining opera to be a dull and dreary thing were converted in an evening; many others who had never heard or expected to hear opera as long as they lived had it brought to their hospital or bedside.” In a time when we can access any music with a mere flick of a mouse, it is hard to imagine just how extraordinary this access to the sequestered sounds of Covent Garden must have been.
  • (17) I'd had a run-in with this dreary professor at the University of London, and dinner at the Reform was his peace offering.
  • (18) At Christmas I went to department stores in Buchanan Street and bought inexpensive ornaments and prints, again not understanding – or not understanding well enough – that seeing more of me was worth any number of smoked glass decanters or pictures by the Impressionists (an unusually dreary example of which replaced FD Millet's Between Two Fires in the frame above the fireplace, until my parents, suffering it in silence for long enough, papered it over with Constable's The Hay Wain).
  • (19) It has not been able to find a place of comfort on the spectrum between dreary and frightening, perhaps because this is the wrong spectrum .
  • (20) This was the zero-hours work of the boom – dreary but marginal.