What's the difference between disconsolate and dreary?

Disconsolate


Definition:

  • (n.) Disconsolateness.
  • (v. t.) Destitute of consolation; deeply dejected and dispirited; hopelessly sad; comfortless; filled with grief; as, a bereaved and disconsolate parent.
  • (v. t.) Inspiring dejection; saddening; cheerless; as, the disconsolate darkness of the winter nights.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) I suspect you would have said that even it wasn’t a pile of poo,” Lidington observed disconsolately.
  • (2) But not so – sadly for Labour business spokesman Chuka Umunna and his disconsolate cohorts.
  • (3) Morrissey: Lord of the Flies Wave upon wave upon wave upon wave washed me up on the desolate, disconsolate island of Rock Celebrity.
  • (4) But the picture of them sitting disconsolately at home, wrapped in Asda's hot-selling "snuggies" (blankets with sleeves) with the heating turned down, is probably misleading.
  • (5) We made mistakes and Agüero is a world-class finisher,” a disconsolate Steve McClaren said.
  • (6) Any further delay [to imposing the contract] just means we will take longer to eliminate [the] weekend effect [of higher death rates among patients admitted to hospital on a Saturday or Sunday].” The Guardian view on the government’s problems: time for intelligent compromise | Editorial Read more The MPs involved were disconsolate at Hunt’s response to what they hoped was a face-saving solution for both sides.
  • (7) But far beyond his family, he leaves a host of disconsolate people, from his closest friends to those whose only acquaintance was through what he wrote and said, who know they have lost a rare, wondrously talented and wholly original man.
  • (8) By the fourth goal, one disconsolate Brazil fan near the giant screens on Copacabana beach walked over to a group of Germans and handed them his national flag in a gesture of surrender.
  • (9) After sliding in to try and stop Negredo scoring Manchester City's second, he got to his feet as if to trudg disconsolently back into position, only to go to ground in agony after something appeared to buckle in his knee.
  • (10) Even the most disconsolate and recalcitrant rebel concedes that the party has spoken and that the leader’s mandate commands attention, even humility, although not yet sincere respect.
  • (11) Among angry teachers and disconsolate pupils, there is a particularly loud outcry about shifts in the grade thresholds in GCSE English.
  • (12) It was the correct decision by the letter of the law, though not by the spirit of the final, as shown when Ashley Williams ran over to console Duke – a former team-mate at Stockport County – as he trudged away disconsolately after the first sending off of his career.
  • (13) "We felt disconsolate [about the North Koreans' pullout] at first, but we didn't know that would it would last this long," said Yeo Dongkoo, director at Sudo Corporation, which produces handkerchiefs and scarves at Kaesong.
  • (14) Occasionally groups of disconsolate policemen armed with old Kalashnikovs squat in roadside posts but there is an overwhelming if diffuse sense of threat.
  • (15) Disconsolate pandas have struggled to breed but that little inconvenience has now been overcome.
  • (16) Here, Pratt appeared to be the leader, pepping up his disconsolate comrades for the challenges ahead at a time of toil and heartache.
  • (17) By then, the Conservative battle bus, with David Cameron on board, was heading disconsolately for Wales.
  • (18) Akinfeev was disconsolate as he trudged off the pitch and into an encouraging if somewhat strange high five from Capello.
  • (19) This shared conviction left Sunderland’s manager looking on disconsolate as, inspired by Christian Eriksen, Pochettino’s Tottenham monopolised the ball.
  • (20) Colleagues who remained at their campaign headquarters in Appleton were disconsolate, slumped before a computer screen, slowly realising that almost 500 days of rebellion had ended in failure despite impressive mobilisation of their base.

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.