(a.) Hard; inflexible; obstinate; sour in aspect; hardy; bold.
Example Sentences:
(1) Reports from the scenes of Muslim Brotherhood and Freedom and Justice Party rallies conveyed a dour mood in Cairo, while active clashes were reported in both coastal cities and upper Egypt.
(2) There’s hard work and dour activities and that’s what I’m going to be doing.” Corbyn and his deputy, Tom Watson , are expected to make regular – and more public – visits to Scotland to help Scottish Labour avoid a further rout at next May’s Holyrood elections; the latest opinion polls suggest the SNP is on course to win a second successive overall majority with its approval ratings at more than 50%.
(3) However, as we watch Blade Runner , Deckard doesn’t feel like a replicant; he is dour and unengaged, but lacks his victims’ detached innocence, their staccato puzzlement at their own untrained feelings.
(4) Reith, “his dour handsome face scarred like that of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a strange shepherd for such a mixed, bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-adventurers which … even a Dartmoor prison governor might have had difficulty in controlling”.
(5) The dour Zenawi could not resist a swipe at western pundits who had once written off Africa.
(6) A spectacular fall from grace on the pitch – from first to seventh, playing dour football that is anathema to fans who feasted on success throughout the Ferguson era – will also lead to renewed scrutiny of the club's controversial US owners, the Glazer family , away from it.
(7) The seafront was grey and almost deserted; outside the dour concrete venue, there was a single delegate having a blustery cigarette.
(8) But it was in westerns that Peck's dour integrity showed itself best: unshaven and tough in Yellow Sky (1948); a dude learning to adapt to the west in The Big Country (1958); and obsessively after the men who raped and killed his wife in The Bravados (1958).
(9) On Tuesday, the bunkhouse breakfast room felt like a hunting lodge, with wives and girlfriends serving meals while working-class men with beards, flannel shirts and dour expressions milled about.
(10) Milosevic himself, until then a dour and orthodox communist, appeared to realise his gift for rhetoric and the power of nationalism.
(11) Saki (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916) was raised by his strict, dour aunts and grandmother, and was gay but closeted all his life – for good reason, since homosexual acts between men were still illegal.
(12) Fun is fun, and please don't try and stop people having fun, things are dour enough as it is."
(13) Because there is no ‘message’ – there’s just Jeremy!” Membership Event: Guardian Live | The future of Labour: meet the next leader By the end of the night, even the dour stewards were applauding.
(14) This late action made the preceding dour fare seem all the more disappointing.
(15) We were told he would be the dour, humourless lefty; and again he has been a challenge to expectations.
(16) We talk some more about Mad Men , about: "The swirl and sound and fury of it… For a show that is as dour and moody and pendulous as ours, we have fun."
(17) George averaged only 14.5 points and six rebounds in the first two games of the series and started slowly against on Friday before gathering pace in the dour encounter.
(18) The two TV presenters broadcasting from the crowd – she in a gold-spangled minidress and rigid curls, him dour in black tie – shot baleful looks in his direction as he carried on honking.
(19) Murray is a bit dour true to his Scottish nature but he is an excellent player.
(20) Jeremy Corbyn conceded that it would not be easy to revive Labour’s position in Scotland but promised “hard work and dour activities” as he made his first visit to the nation since his election as party leader.
Stony
Definition:
(superl.) Of or pertaining to stone, consisting of, or abounding in, stone or stones; resembling stone; hard; as, a stony tower; a stony cave; stony ground; a stony crust.
(superl.) Converting into stone; petrifying; petrific.
(superl.) Inflexible; cruel; unrelenting; pitiless; obdurate; perverse; cold; morally hard; appearing as if petrified; as, a stony heart; a stony gaze.
Example Sentences:
(1) Sitting on his stony porch, Rao asserts that he is not being romantic about the benefits of agriculture: “Here we earn more than 120,000 rupees [£1,170] a year, and our cost of living is one-fifth that of a city’s.
(2) Digital examination revealed that the prostate became stony-hard and larger 10 weeks after the initial BCG immunotherapy.
(3) Freed of the need to wave their tentacles around to hunt for food, the coral can devote more energy to secreting the mineral calcium carbonate, from which they form a stony exoskeleton.
(4) Not because the arts and humanities are especially hard to legitimise, but because everything is hard to justify when your opponent is standing there with crossed arms and a stony face.
(5) If someone’s able to keep such a stony-faced expression, it’s either high theatrics or they have no sympathy,” she added.
(6) It would face the same challenges and would continue to act in much the same way, steering the country towards new elections in late 2017 or 2018 and pursuing the stony path of incremental economic reform.
(7) We evaluated five enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays from Stony Brook (NY) University Hospital, Cambridge Bioscience (Worcester, Mass), Hillcrest Biologicals (Cypress, Calif), Sigma Diagnostics (St Louis, Mo), and Zeus-Wampole Scientific Inc (Raritan, NJ) and two fluorescent antibody tests (3M [Diagnostic Systems Inc, Santa Clara, Calif] and FIAX [Whittaker M.A.
(8) Without naming and shaming, during the USA's game against Portugal, I saw one leftwing tweeter ask with plaintive, stony-faced sincerity "how can anyone be supporting the imperialists?"
(9) No one is considered universally funny: there will always be someone stony-faced and dry-eyed in a room filled with hilarity, wondering what everyone else is laughing at.
(10) To a stony-faced audience at a conference organised by Learning Without Frontiers, she said: "We should recognise and embrace some of the good things that came out of the 19th century."
(11) The villages, whose populations range from a few hundred to 2,000, are scattered on stony land criss-crossed by busy roads, electricity pylons and cables and water pipes.
(12) Watched stony-faced by the Israeli delegation led by ambassador Ron Prosor, Abbas on Wednesday called for the international community to recognise Palestine as a state under occupation in the same way that countries were occupied in the second world war.
(13) If one of the first signs of ageing is being irritated by the young, I'd transformed into the ultimate short-fused, stony-eyed Methuselah.
(14) To help meet the need for physician manpower in preventive medicine a new residency was established at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in July 1983.
(15) The Stony Brook Child Psychiatric Checklist, a parent completed rating instrument based on DSM-III-R, was used as part of a psychiatric inpatient admission evaluation.
(16) At the School of Medicine of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the surgical clerkship became mandatory in 1976.
(17) Labour's riposte will be that the more difficult the economic news the stronger the yearning will be for a "change election" on the economy and the greater the premium on fairness in austerity – fertile terrain for Miliband, stony ground for the incumbent Cameron.
(18) The gland becomes stony hard, is not displaceable and, characteristically, the fibrous tissue penetrates the capsule and infiltrates into surrounding structures such as muscles, vessels, nerves and even the trachea.
(19) The liver was markedly enlarged and of stony consistency.
(20) The anti-Trident activists wave at the Faslane workers as they come and go; the workers remain stony-faced.