What's the difference between dreary and sombre?

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.

Sombre


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make somber, or dark; to make shady.
  • (a.) Dull; dusky; somewhat dark; gloomy; as, a somber forest; a somber house.
  • (a.) Melancholy; sad; grave; depressing; as, a somber person; somber reflections.
  • (n.) Gloom; obscurity; duskiness; somberness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Photograph: KHIZR KHAN This sombre, serene oasis overlooking the Potomac river might also prove the graveyard of Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US presidency.
  • (2) Seethetree Kingley Vale, Sussex Forget the colours of autumn; this place is sombre in colour and atmosphere but you will be walking among probably the oldest living organisms in Britain.
  • (3) Slowing growth, financial fragility, governments teetering on the brink of insolvency and default, and clear signs of a public backlash against the excesses of the rich and powerful: all have created a sombre backdrop to the invitation-only affair.
  • (4) King gave a sombre assessment of the government's challenge at a press conference to launch the Bank's quarterly inflation report.
  • (5) Top floor: a roomful of sombre youths vying for individual supremacy using some form of networked arcade strategy game that uses collectible cards.
  • (6) In sombre tones he did indeed acknowledge that there are no sunny uplands as we "now face a crisis that is the economic equivalent of war" .
  • (7) In March 1990, in a ceremony in the new Congress building built by Pinochet in his home town of Valparaiso - 80 miles from the capital, Santiago, and intended to remain well out of mind of the real centres of power - a sombre Pinochet handed the presidential sash over to Aylwin.
  • (8) Q has upped his gadget game Facebook Twitter Pinterest The brooding and sombre Skyfall scored a few points for post-modern playfulness via its introductory scene for the new Q, in which Ben Whishaw might as well have offered Bond a couple of Netflix vouchers and a year’s subscription to Cosmopolitan for all the wow factor his proffered “gadgets” achieved.
  • (9) Another report, Sir Derek Wanless's Securing Good Health for the Whole Population (2004), set out the sombre consequences of our slobby habits: life expectancy cut by nine years, increased coronary heart disease and diabetes, and a cost of £8.2bn to the economy.
  • (10) She’s very serious in her style, very well-informed in her style, it won’t be the same as David Cameron,” he said, welcoming the idea of a more sombre tone.
  • (11) In a sombre closing speech, Clegg warned of "a long hard road ahead", and said the economy was "our biggest concern" because "the recovery is fragile".
  • (12) A grand and sombre staircase - dark, looming, pitiless - leads up from the Axes to the exhibits, allowing Libeskind to play one last trick on the visitor by luring him up a final flight that goes nowhere, before his voice gives way to the memoranda of Jewish history.
  • (13) It is now recognized that as much as left ventricular dysfunction these ventricular arrhythmias are of sombre prognosis.
  • (14) South Africans have undergone sombre introspection of late with the economy slowing, unemployment sky highand, worst of all, violent unrest that included the killing of workers at the Lonmin platinum mine in August.
  • (15) Helen Hunt and John Hawkes are deservedly recognised for their fine performances in The Sessions, while Kathryn Bigelow 's sombre, gripping Zero Dark Thirty bags a quartet of nominations, burnishing its credentials as the dark horse of this year's Oscar race.
  • (16) There were reports this morning that Gaga was reluctant to perform after the death of Alexander McQueen last week and had told organisers she would only play a set that was suitably sombre (with images of McQueen projected as a backdrop apparently).
  • (17) In a sombre letter to his youngest child, Mohamed wrote: "Sorry because you were born where free people are behind bars, including your father."
  • (18) Although they may draw images of sombre and disciplined technicians in white coats, labs in the modern industrial context are a nebulous idea.
  • (19) Although relatively rare, stenosis must be diagnosed in view of its sombre spontaneous prognosis (one patient died 3 days after coronary arteriography), of the risk of underestimating its frequency, and of the hazards of selective coronary catheterization in such patients (one of our patients died 15 minutes after coronary exploration).
  • (20) In a sombre ceremony, the eight men were remembered and honoured by name as families and relatives paid their last respects.