What's the difference between dreary and tedious?

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.

Tedious


Definition:

  • (a.) Involving tedium; tiresome from continuance, prolixity, slowness, or the like; wearisome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Parties are a tedious chore, while sponsorships are pretty tiresome too: can you remember the key messaging about that motor oil you agreed to plug to the nearest reporter?
  • (2) Skin deepithelialization is an integral part of many reconstructive procedures, but it can be a tedious and time-consuming ordeal when using conventional techniques.
  • (3) The method provides an antibody reagent that is an attractive alternative to other more tedious means of producing oligospecific antibodies, including monoclonal antibodies, for screening of expression libraries.
  • (4) Richard Kemp, London SE8 I know I'm being tedious, but what are "American" novels?
  • (5) Almond lamb curry: Atul Kochhar This dish derives its main flavour from a spice blend called vadagam, which can be a little tedious to make.
  • (6) Its reliability and convenience represent an improvement over existing methods based on the tedious and time-consuming enzymatic radioisotopic determination of the carnitine formed or on the coupled decarboxylation of [1-14C]alpha-ketoglutarate, a method that cannot be used in crude extracts.
  • (7) Breathe deeply.” With the worryingly rapid rise of diagnoses in autism across the world over the past couple of decades comes another tedious phenomenon: the casual use of the word “autistic” to describe behaviour by people who, frankly, don’t know a lot about autism.
  • (8) One of the advantages of OK-432 therapy over lymphokine-activated killer cell therapy, therefore, is that the former does not require the tedious and time-consuming in vitro procedures which are essential for the latter.
  • (9) Fashion people don't mind being dismissed as "weird" – hell, "weird" is precisely what they're going for, because they're trying to show that they're different from you, you tedious River Island-shopping pleb.
  • (10) The workup for polyuria and polydipsia, especially in those cases with normal or near normal blood work, can be tedious, time consuming, confusing, and not without significant patient morbidity.
  • (11) The manual radiographic method is accurate both in normals and in patients with airways disease but is very tedious to use.
  • (12) These methods have several undesirable features; some are tedious and time-consuming, some remove antibody along with nonspecific inhibitors, and different techniques are usually required to remove the nonspecific inhibitors for different viruses.
  • (13) Austen Lynch Garstang, Lancashire • The government’s plan to turn all schools into academies suggests it has reached the same conclusion as Macbeth: “I am in blood stepped so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over.” Steve Loveman Sheffield • Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
  • (14) This avoids the tedious dissection involved in looking for small distal branches with their variable location.
  • (15) Today's techniques can produce ordered arrays of DNA fragments and overlapping sets of DNA clones covering extensive genomic regions, but they are relatively slow and tedious.
  • (16) Many of the spontaneous and in some cases leaderless Arab spring movements of 2011 were unsuited to taking on the tedious roles of political parties and constitutional lawyers.
  • (17) The technique was further simplified by using commercially available antibiotic-containing disks, thereby alleviating the tedious and time-consuming procedure of preparing the disks.
  • (18) A major obstacle in the application of quantitative microelectrophoresis has been tedious manipulations and calculations.
  • (19) The advantages of the titrimetric method include simplicity, rapidity, convenience, sensitivity, reproducibility and specificity, whereas the gravimetric method is tedious and time-consuming.
  • (20) Recording the required information may be tedious, but it can be carried out using either a paper-based system or its computerized equivalent.