What's the difference between drab and dreary?

Drab


Definition:

  • (n.) A low, sluttish woman.
  • (n.) A lewd wench; a strumpet.
  • (n.) A wooden box, used in salt works for holding the salt when taken out of the boiling pans.
  • (v. i.) To associate with strumpets; to wench.
  • (n.) A kind of thick woolen cloth of a dun, or dull brownish yellow, or dull gray, color; -- called also drabcloth.
  • (n.) A dull brownish yellow or dull gray color.
  • (a.) Of a color between gray and brown.
  • (n.) A drab color.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Mendl's candy colours contrast sharply with the gothic garb of our hero's enemies and the greys of the prison uniforms – as well as scenes showing the hotel later, in the 1960s, its opulence lost beneath a drab communist refurb.
  • (2) And it will almost certainly continue arriving in dribs and drabs, based on the Sea Dragon's observations.
  • (3) While Klimt was creating modern art there, Hitler was going to the opera to hear Wagner (conducted by the modernist Gustav Mahler), and soon eking a living painting drab topographic scenes.
  • (4) The most visible sign of this is the arrival each day, when parliament is in session in its lavish, marble-decked halls in the new capital of Naypyidaw , of scores of officers, natty in their freshly pressed olive drab.
  • (5) Here was a woman, "dismal, drab, embarrassing," sodden with "self-pity," who in the Golden Notebook had single-handedly set back the women's movement "a good long way".
  • (6) Inside, photographs of these often drab exteriors are contrasted with the vibrantly colourful images of the interiors.
  • (7) It is incredible the bombers did not have tickets but, regardless, they would not have got through the body searches at the gates.” Pavlovic and his wife, Ljiljana, had been selling scarves outside the arena prior to kick-off but, despite having tickets for the match, ambled down towards McDonald’s where they had parked in Impasse de la Cokerie, a drab cul de sac between characterless office blocks, to meet his cousin and her husband.
  • (8) Second half: Barcelona's players have been ready to start the second half for several minutes, while Inter's are emerging from the tunnel in dribs and drabs.
  • (9) A fter five years in the job of chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw will deliver his final annual general report as head of Ofsted on Thursday morning – possibly to his own regret and almost certainly to the regret of education journalists, for whom life can sometimes be a little drab.
  • (10) Photograph: John Brunton Situated smack on the "strada del vino", it is easy to drive straight past this drab-looking tratttoria.
  • (11) The 6.6-kilobase DNA fragment expressed five polypeptides with molecular masses of 15.5, 5, 18, 90, and 32 kilodaltons encoded by the draA, draB, draC, draD, and draE genes, respectively.
  • (12) On Monday, Gao began the latest phase of her crusade, travelling to a drab five-storey courthouse in western Beijing with about a dozen other relatives to file a lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines before a legal deadline that coincides with the disaster’s two-year anniversary.
  • (13) On the surface, the subject could not have been more drab.
  • (14) Slovakia v Paraguay in Bloem: another drab spectacle with the Slovakians managing to run around aimlessly for 90 minutes.
  • (15) And that's absolutely the right, drab clothing to reach for as the post-Leveson debate enters a new round.
  • (16) Despite all the dribs and drabs of innovation in the ocean of old-media rules, we're beginning to see a kind of ideal on the horizon.
  • (17) Anything positive would stand out against what's been a pretty drab backdrop so far.
  • (18) Yet sometimes a little decay here and there, some graffiti, flyers posted on walls and lampposts, can add liveliness to what would otherwise be a drab urban experience.
  • (19) High up in the National Theatre, Patrick Marber is huddled in the corner of a small, drab room.
  • (20) An AQI reading of 300 blots out the sun, smothering the city in drab uniformity.

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.