(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.
Stubborn
Definition:
(a.) Firm as a stub or stump; stiff; unbending; unyielding; persistent; hence, unreasonably obstinate in will or opinion; not yielding to reason or persuasion; refractory; harsh; -- said of persons and things; as, stubborn wills; stubborn ore; a stubborn oak; as stubborn as a mule.
Example Sentences:
(1) It has announced a four-stage programme of reforms that will tackle most of these stubborn and longstanding problems, including Cinderella issues such as how energy companies treat their small business customers.
(2) Of course there are some who are stubborn, like Robert Mugabe.
(3) The prime minister insisted, however, that he and other world leaders were not being stubborn over demands that the Syrian leader, President Bashar al-Assad, step down at the end of the peace process.
(4) It’s clear their relationship is most similar to that of a stubborn son and his long suffering mother.
(5) The contrast between these two worlds – one legal and flourishing, the other illegal and stubbornly disregarding of state lines – can seem baffling, yet it may have profound consequences for whether this unique experiment spreads.
(6) The causes of failure after acute injury include extensive local soft tissue and bony damage, severe concomitant head, chest or abdominal wounding, stubborn reliance on negative arteriograms in patients with probable arterial injury, failure to repair simultaneous venous injuries, or harvesting of a vein graft from a severely damaged extremity.
(7) "It was the character of David Cameron – his stubbornness, his anger and his rush towards war – which was the central cause of his defeat on Thursday night."
(8) Rebus, promised the Scottish author, will be "as stubborn and anarchic as ever", and will find himself in trouble with the author's latest creation, Malcolm Fox, of Edinburgh's internal affairs unit.
(9) A rising jobless total and an unemployment rate sticking at a stubbornly high 8% overshadowed a better than expected 27,100 fall in the claimant count in April, which compared with analysts' forecasts for a 20,000 drop.
(10) But the part of me that resists that, that is stubborn and wants to bulldoze things, gets in my way.
(11) One is the stubborn mystery of how a giant of its liberation movements, an intellectual who showed forgiveness and magnanimity years before Mandela emerged from jail, could turn into the living caricature of despotism.
(12) Sanctioning is no longer a last resort tactic aimed at the stubbornly workshy, say critics, but a crude way of pushing down claimant numbers and cutting back on the benefits bill.
(13) He was only 29 at the time, but nevertheless had that kind of stubborn certainty.
(14) They have a sort of stubbornness.” He later deals with hecklers at a Fifa HQ press event : “Listen, gentlemen, we are not in a bazaar .
(15) Dombrovskis stubbornly refused, instead pursuing "internal devaluation", depressing wages and conducting what he says was a 17% fiscal adjustment programme (the IMF says 15%).
(16) They formed a stubborn line in front of Wojciech Szczesny’s goal even if the statistics showed Arsenal’s pass-completion rate went down from 89% in the first half to 66% in the second.
(17) This was the first time a grouping of BME senior managers crossing health and social care had met together to look at barriers to gaining top jobs, and ways of breaking through systems which stubbornly never seem to shift.
(18) Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations.
(19) At which point – obviously – you reach the stubborn limits of the debate: from even the most supposedly imaginative Labour people as much as any Tories, such heresies would presumably be greeted with sneering derision.
(20) A stubborn negativity characterised the insurrection.