What's the difference between dull and flat?

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.

Flat


Definition:

  • (superl.) Having an even and horizontal surface, or nearly so, without prominences or depressions; level without inclination; plane.
  • (superl.) Lying at full length, or spread out, upon the ground; level with the ground or earth; prostrate; as, to lie flat on the ground; hence, fallen; laid low; ruined; destroyed.
  • (superl.) Wanting relief; destitute of variety; without points of prominence and striking interest.
  • (superl.) Tasteless; stale; vapid; insipid; dead; as, fruit or drink flat to the taste.
  • (superl.) Unanimated; dull; uninteresting; without point or spirit; monotonous; as, a flat speech or composition.
  • (superl.) Lacking liveliness of commercial exchange and dealings; depressed; dull; as, the market is flat.
  • (superl.) Clear; unmistakable; peremptory; absolute; positive; downright.
  • (superl.) Below the true pitch; hence, as applied to intervals, minor, or lower by a half step; as, a flat seventh; A flat.
  • (superl.) Not sharp or shrill; not acute; as, a flat sound.
  • (superl.) Sonant; vocal; -- applied to any one of the sonant or vocal consonants, as distinguished from a nonsonant (or sharp) consonant.
  • (adv.) In a flat manner; directly; flatly.
  • (adv.) Without allowance for accrued interest.
  • (n.) A level surface, without elevation, relief, or prominences; an extended plain; specifically, in the United States, a level tract along the along the banks of a river; as, the Mohawk Flats.
  • (n.) A level tract lying at little depth below the surface of water, or alternately covered and left bare by the tide; a shoal; a shallow; a strand.
  • (n.) Something broad and flat in form
  • (n.) A flat-bottomed boat, without keel, and of small draught.
  • (n.) A straw hat, broad-brimmed and low-crowned.
  • (n.) A car without a roof, the body of which is a platform without sides; a platform car.
  • (n.) A platform on wheel, upon which emblematic designs, etc., are carried in processions.
  • (n.) The flat part, or side, of anything; as, the broad side of a blade, as distinguished from its edge.
  • (n.) A floor, loft, or story in a building; especially, a floor of a house, which forms a complete residence in itself.
  • (n.) A horizontal vein or ore deposit auxiliary to a main vein; also, any horizontal portion of a vein not elsewhere horizontal.
  • (n.) A dull fellow; a simpleton; a numskull.
  • (n.) A character [/] before a note, indicating a tone which is a half step or semitone lower.
  • (n.) A homaloid space or extension.
  • (v. t.) To make flat; to flatten; to level.
  • (v. t.) To render dull, insipid, or spiritless; to depress.
  • (v. t.) To depress in tone, as a musical note; especially, to lower in pitch by half a tone.
  • (v. i.) To become flat, or flattened; to sink or fall to an even surface.
  • (v. i.) To fall form the pitch.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Michael James, 52, from Tower Hamlets Three days after telling his landlord that the flat upstairs was a deathtrap, Michael James was handed an eviction notice.
  • (2) A tiny studio flat that has become a symbol of London's soaring property prices is to be investigated by planning, environmental health and fire safety authorities after the Guardian revealed details of its shoebox-like proportions.
  • (3) With the flat-fee system, drug charges are not recorded when the drug is dispensed by the pharmacy; data for charging doses are obtained directly from the MAR forms generated by the nursing staff.
  • (4) Taking into account the calculated volume and considering the triangular image as one face of the particle, it is suggested that eIF-3 has the shape of a flat triangular prism with a height of about 7 nm and the above-mentioned side-lengths.
  • (5) He gets Lyme disease , he dates indie girls and strippers; he lives in disused warehouses and crappy flats with weirded-out flatmates who want to set him on fire and buy the petrol to do so.
  • (6) The b-wave in the ERG was lacking and the EOG was flat.
  • (7) In north-west Copenhagen, among the quiet, graffiti-tagged streets of red-brick blocks and low-rise social housing bordering the multi-ethnic Nørrebro district, police continued to cordon off roads and search a flat near the spot where officers killed a man believed to be behind Denmark’s bloodiest attacks in over a decade.
  • (8) Distance running performance is slower on hilly race courses than flat courses even when the start and finish are at the same elevation, resulting in equal amounts of uphill and downhill running.
  • (9) In autumn, leaf-heaps composted themselves on sunken patios, and were shovelled up by irritated owners of basement flats.
  • (10) Here we present images of polydeoxyadenylate molecules aligned in parallel, with their bases lying flat on a surface of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite and with their charged phosphodiester backbones protruding upwards.
  • (11) All other broad-spectrum benzimidazole anthelmintics, regardless of substituent at the 2 position (methyl carbamate or thiazolyl group), are flat.
  • (12) We investigated the mechanism by which retinoic acid causes growth arrest and flat reversion of SSV-NRK, simian sarcoma virus-transformed normal rat kidney cells.
  • (13) When she speaks, it is in a quiet, clear voice that is middle-class but also flat and London-inflected enough to seem almost classless: it is the voice of the modern southern English professional.
  • (14) After about 3 weeks of culture, N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea-pretreated fetal rat brain cells showed focal proliferation of neural cells on an underlayer of flat, epithelioid cells.
  • (15) In order to determine an histological high-risk group, we chose cases with preneoplastic conditions (60 CAG, 10 biopsies of gastric remnants, 3 flat adenomas and 55 gastrectomies by cancer or ulcer).
  • (16) During inspiration, the velocity was greater and the shape of the flow profile throughout diastole tended to be flat.
  • (17) The following relationships were found: Round nuclei have higher rates of DNA synthesis than flat ones.
  • (18) The individual micelles are relatively flat, ring-shaped structures, the center offering space for one of the two bulky sugar chains of the saponins.
  • (19) Microinfusion of the selective 5-HT1A receptor agonist, 8-hydroxy-(di-N-propylamino)tetralin (8-OHDPAT), into the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) produced a marked behavioural hypoactivity and flat body posture.
  • (20) Don was racing the Dodge through the Bonneville Salt Flats , where Gary Gabelich had just (on 23 October) broken the land-speed record.