What's the difference between dull and dumb?

Dull


Definition:

  • (superl.) Slow of understanding; wanting readiness of apprehension; stupid; doltish; blockish.
  • (superl.) Slow in action; sluggish; unready; awkward.
  • (superl.) Insensible; unfeeling.
  • (superl.) Not keen in edge or point; lacking sharpness; blunt.
  • (superl.) Not bright or clear to the eye; wanting in liveliness of color or luster; not vivid; obscure; dim; as, a dull fire or lamp; a dull red or yellow; a dull mirror.
  • (superl.) Heavy; gross; cloggy; insensible; spiritless; lifeless; inert.
  • (superl.) Furnishing little delight, spirit, or variety; uninteresting; tedious; cheerless; gloomy; melancholy; depressing; as, a dull story or sermon; a dull occupation or period; hence, cloudy; overcast; as, a dull day.
  • (v. t.) To deprive of sharpness of edge or point.
  • (v. t.) To make dull, stupid, or sluggish; to stupefy, as the senses, the feelings, the perceptions, and the like.
  • (v. t.) To render dim or obscure; to sully; to tarnish.
  • (v. t.) To deprive of liveliness or activity; to render heavy; to make inert; to depress; to weary; to sadden.
  • (v. i.) To become dull or stupid.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain," Wallace wrote at one point, "because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."
  • (2) Similar systems were put in place at Dulles outside Washington DC, Newark and Chicago airports on Thursday.
  • (3) The soft, dull, malacic appearance of the center results from lack of a true surface layer of tangential collagen fibers.
  • (4) Here I am in Los Angeles being paid $30,000 to do next to nothing and still I'm finding life rather dull.
  • (5) A significant proportion of splenic B cells reacted with these mAb, although lower number (one-log less) than peritoneal B cells and a small proportion of H7dull+ splenic B cells seems to be Ly-1(CD5)dull+, 1 of 200 splenic B cells responded to IL-5 for IgM production.
  • (6) A 58-year-old man complained of dull left lower quadrant pain and constipation.
  • (7) They will begin next week at Liberty airport in Newark, New Jersey; Dulles, outside Washington DC; Chicago O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.
  • (8) At both observations, crowns were rated on 5-point Likert scales for outline form, porosity, smoothness, reflectance, texture, dullness, defects, and general esthetic appearances.
  • (9) On the other hand AMH2 showed the dull-positive reaction with some monocytes and pleural exudate cells among above-mentioned cells.
  • (10) Britain’s Got Talent review – Simon Cowell is looking like Caligula after a dull day at the Coliseum Read more The show, won last year by boy band Collabro, began eight years ago with 4.9 million viewers, rising to 8.8 million for its second series launch before hitting the 10 million mark for the first time in 2009 with 10.3 million.
  • (11) Disseminated annular psoriasiform lesions developed over a period of 2 months in a 48-year-old man with no preceding psoriatic history of drug intake, being accompanied by general dullness and arthralgia.
  • (12) 3) At the severe stage, pain and dullness at the back, numbness at arms and hands, hand coldness, sleep disturbance etc.
  • (13) One month after surgery, she complained of swelling and a dull pain in the right leg without cardiorespiratory symptoms.
  • (14) Black-hair follicular dysplasia in dogs of mixed breeding was delineated by hypotrichosis and dullness of most black regions of the coat.
  • (15) Endoscopic examination disclosed an almost roundish, smooth-surfaced, flat and dull red area corresponding to IIc (slightly depressed type).
  • (16) Their surface phenotype was Thy-1+(dull), Ly-1.2+(dull), Lyt-2-, L3T4-, 9F3+, and 3A1+, which is consistent with that found in intact lpr mice.
  • (17) The engines, gearboxes and even the doors now have a complexity that sees them constructed elsewhere, but the transformation on this line of the dull sheen of aluminium parts into a moving vehicle at the other end is still something to behold.
  • (18) Flow cytometry showed three types of trophozoite staining by mAb: (i) bright staining of greater than 90% of trophozoites, with aggregation of the organisms; (ii) bright staining of approximately 90% of trophozoites, with little or no aggregation; (iii) dull staining of approximately 20% of trophozoites, without aggregation.
  • (19) The percentage of dull CD8+CD11b+ cells (natural killer cells) among TG-2 cells was lower than that in peripheral blood, but there was no significant difference in bright CD8+CD11b+ cells (suppressor-effector T cells) between thyroid glands and peripheral blood.
  • (20) It was filed in my mind as a pretty but dull destination, full of pensioners on package deals and cruises.

Dumb


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute of the power of speech; unable; to utter articulate sounds; as, the dumb brutes.
  • (a.) Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not accompanied by words; as, dumb show.
  • (a.) Lacking brightness or clearness, as a color.
  • (v. t.) To put to silence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cheers, then, to an apparent alliance of the NME, a few people in London's trendy E1 district and some dumb young musicians, because "New Rave" is upon us, and there is apparently no stopping it.
  • (2) Four brain smears from dogs which died of dumb rabies were positive for Negri bodies while two brain smears obtained from dogs which died of the furious form of rabies were negative.
  • (3) The court heard that MP responded to Nimmo's message of "Dumb blonde bitch" with the message "That's dumb Dr blonde bitch to you".
  • (4) At the moment, most of our electricity and gas meters are dumb, analogue devices: they record your consumption and someone comes round periodically to take a reading.
  • (5) We now show by immunoelectron microscopy that Fab fragments of a desmin-specific monoclonal antibody mixed with the rod lead to dumb-bell-shaped structures.
  • (6) On admission, a dumb-bell type huge tumor with the destruction of the orbital roof was demonstrated on CT scan and MRI.
  • (7) The non-solid bacilli were further classified on the basis of their morphology to the following forms:-- (a) short but evenly stained (b) indented (c) beaded (d) dumb-bell shaped (e) coccoid and (f) fragmented.
  • (8) In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.
  • (9) Large granules, 160 nm in diameter, already reported in the ITP (KEMALI 1977a), are also shown as well as tiny flat mixed with large flat dense core vesicles of dumb-bell shape.
  • (10) Critics accused the BBC of dumbing down when Kirsty Young replaced Sue Lawley as host of Desert Island Discs, while t he dismissal of Ed Stourton from the Today presenting team was executed shambolically , with the presenter learning his fate from a rival news organisation rather than his bosses.
  • (11) As in canine rabies there are furious and dumb forms of the disease.
  • (12) Charlie Hebdo was launched by a group of "non-conformists" who had previously run a monthly called Hara Kiri (whose subtitle read: "dumb and nasty").
  • (13) He might have been born with a silver spoon and declared bankruptcy four or five times but he is not dumb.
  • (14) A GST on fresh food is an exceptionally dumb strategy in the midst of an obesity crisis | Catherine King Read more Labor said that much of that money would go towards compensating lower income earners, leaving little money for other services.
  • (15) Dumb rabies and cysticerci in dogs being sold to people in rural communities pose potential public health hazards.
  • (16) In a blog published on Friday afternoon entitled "My teenage mistakes" , Weldon said his year-long flirtation would have remained the embarrassing stuff of his youth had he not a few years later done what he described as a "dumb thing" and boasted about his past in an Oxford student newspaper.
  • (17) Mitt's now trying to rebut the "Let Detroit go bankrupt" line o argument, which is dumb.
  • (18) The internet of things is the idea of creating a home where everything is connected to the internet, creating “swarm intelligence” from individually dumb devices.
  • (19) Gove launched an all-out attack on the "educational establishment", claiming it suffered from "defeatism, political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down".
  • (20) "We will tackle head-on the defeatism, the political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down that is at the heart of our educational establishment."