(superl.) Evil in great degree; dreadful; dismal; horrible; terrible; lamentable.
Example Sentences:
(1) Why is it so surprising to people that a boy like Chol, just out of conflict, has thought through the needs of his country in such a detailed way?” While Beah’s zeal is laudable, the situation in South Sudan is dire .
(2) It is that beautiful moment when the original Metamorphosis is destroyed so that it can be refashioned for a global community of readers in dire need of new forms of storytelling.
(3) In this investigation, reanalysis of responses to case vignettes obtained from 436 psychologists, psychiatrists, and internists revealed that on the issue of confidentiality management, these health care providers discriminate among cases involving: Premeditated harm to others, socially irresponsible acts with possible dire consequences to self or others, and minor theft.
(4) The report’s concluding chapters raised dire warning that the operations of contemporary child protection agencies were replicating many of the destructive dynamics of the Stolen Generations era.
(5) Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, warned Barack Obama in public remarks this month that history had shown “sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences”.
(6) Algeria had not scored a World Cup goal since they drew 1-1 with Northern Ireland at Mexico 1986, a run that took in five matches, including that dire 0-0 draw with England in Cape Town four years ago.
(7) Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire.
(8) High among the range of issues was the media dominance of the Globo group (whose journalists were chased away from demonstrations by an irate mob), inefficient use of public funds, forced relocations linked to Olympic real estate developments, the treatment of indigenous groups, dire inequality and excessive use of force by police in favela communities.
(9) Burrows had resigned as governor of Bank of Ireland, leaving the lender in dire straits, with big losses and mounting debt threatening its very survival.
(10) Yet the inability to get on in life is a now a major and growing problem for middle-class children and this group is in dire need of attention, it is expected to report.
(11) Vince Cable, their shadow chancellor, said: "The Liberal Democrats welcome the government's recognition that radical action is now needed, reflecting the dire and deteriorating position of the UK economy.
(12) Its willingness to ignore diplomatic convention and use its Kuala Lumpur embassy to conduct an extraterritorial assassination will be seen as setting a dire precedent that cannot be allowed to stand.
(13) What is clear, however, is that the reported escalation in fighting exacerbates the already dire humanitarian and human rights situation and the suffering of the Yemeni people,” said Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq.
(14) In a scene of young soldiers at rest for a few minutes at the front, he takes us into their heads: one full of dire forebodings, another singing, one trying to identify a bird on a tree – soldiers dreaming of girls’ breasts, dogs, sausages and poetry.
(15) Despite its own dire predictions on the potential impact of climate change , the government's impact assessment for Flood Re does not take account of " changing flood risk due to deterioration of existing flood defences [or] climate change".
(16) The situation is so dire the National Audit Office has warned that by 2020 schools will be worse funded than at any time since the mid-90s.
(17) John Macgregor, an aid worker who has been accompanying teams delivering food and water to Battambang, described the area as a vast inland sea where conditions are dire and malnutrition is common.
(18) But they are also the stuff of nightmares, because if an electricity grid is overwhelmed by demand, the consequences can be dire, as India discovered recently , when more than 700 million people were left without power.
(19) Thousands of jobs that would have been created will be lost and the knock-on effect will be so dire.
(20) While big businesses have enjoyed access to new couriers, Royal Mail itself eventually reached such a dire state that the Hooper report urged the government to rewrite the law to clarify that competition was a mixed blessing.
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.