What's the difference between desolate and dreary?

Desolate


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute or deprived of inhabitants; deserted; uninhabited; hence, gloomy; as, a desolate isle; a desolate wilderness; a desolate house.
  • (a.) Laid waste; in a ruinous condition; neglected; destroyed; as, desolate altars.
  • (a.) Left alone; forsaken; lonely; comfortless.
  • (a.) Lost to shame; dissolute.
  • (a.) Destitute of; lacking in.
  • (v. t.) To make desolate; to leave alone; to deprive of inhabitants; as, the earth was nearly desolated by the flood.
  • (v. t.) To lay waste; to ruin; to ravage; as, a fire desolates a city.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Downtown LA is improving, but for years it was a desolate hell zone of freeways, office blocks and closed stores.
  • (2) The coast here feels like an island, desolate and full of surprises.
  • (3) The Eritrean government requires every pupil to complete their final year of high school by serving in Sawa Military Camp, in the desolate, semi-desert region of eastern Eritrea .
  • (4) But for the next few hours, though, there's little to excite us: Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) The economic data calendar is a desolate wasteland of nothingness.
  • (5) When it is not clogged with weekend traffic, Container – the English word is used in Arabic – is a desolate spot: a lonely stretch of asphalt, four dingy tollbooth-like structures painted white and green, a few bored Israeli soldiers with automatic rifles.
  • (6) They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg.
  • (7) It was after the Indian wars of the 1870s that the indigenous tribes started to be consigned to reservations – on the worst, most desolate lands for grazing or growing crops.
  • (8) And, Jinkyo-En which was a desolate waste has come to an oasis in life for the Hansenites.
  • (9) The first time I saw the building - a stark, unapologetically angular silver bunker throwing back the heat of a rather desolate part of Berlin - I was content to register its disturbance without question, submitting to its strategies of oppression and disorientation as a child would.
  • (10) "Given the complexity of this crisis and the extent of the distress of our people from the north … we must together, I say together, clear the path ahead to free our country from these invaders, who only leave desolation, deprivation and pain in their wake."
  • (11) And it's Christmas bonanza time along the high streets of Britain, where Oxfam outlets and estate agents lie lonely amid empty sites and desolate closed doors.
  • (12) Australian visual effects wizard Dave Clayton has been nominated for his work on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
  • (13) But, like many streets in New York City and in cities across the US, it is becoming increasingly desolate.
  • (14) Season two crafted complex characters racked with existential ambivalence – heroines marked for the abyss, fragile, flammable outcasts and desolate prodigies, all of whose private pain was as palpable as the crimson bloodbath head witch Evelyn Poole soaks in.
  • (15) Instead, they suggest expanding the scope of services in family planning clinics, out of an awareness that the continuing high prevalence of unintended childbearing, among the young and disadvantaged in particular, is part of a larger problem of living in a desolate social environment.
  • (16) "I watched this guy brushing off dirt from a skull in the most desolate landscape and right then I just knew," Rincón said of his first encounter with palaeontology.
  • (17) There was nothing to see for miles but sage-covered high desert, a landscape of stark beauty and eerie desolation.
  • (18) The contemporary state of the sub-discipline of endocrinology within the framework of internal medicine is generally considered rather desolate, but so far actual data were lacking.
  • (19) Howell said in July: "There are large uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly up in the north-east where there's plenty of room for fracking well away from anyone's residence where it can be conducted without any kind of threat to the rural environment."
  • (20) A subroutine called DESOL for the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations of the type arising in biological simulation problems is described.

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.