What's the difference between dull and monotonous?

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.

Monotonous


Definition:

  • (a.) Uttered in one unvarying tone; continued with dull uniformity; characterized by monotony; without change or variety; wearisome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Increasing concentrations of cholesterol monotonically increase the dipole potential of egg phosphatidylcholine monolayers, from 415 mV with no cholesterol to 493 mV with equimolar cholesterol.
  • (2) "Weak" subjects tended to fall asleep more rapidly during monotonous stimulation, whereas the reverse was true of "strong" subjects.
  • (3) Although their increases were monotonic in a given heart, their sensitivities to catecholamines were considerably variable among hearts.
  • (4) For an "FM specialized" cell, the response pattern to each of the parameters was either monotonic or bell-shaped.
  • (5) The extent of Ca2+ uptake was monotonically increased as the pH increased from 6 to 9.
  • (6) Serum apolipoprotein A-I concentrations were unaltered, apolipoprotein A-II underwent a transient increase, and apolipoprotein B increased monotonically during parenteral nutrition.
  • (7) Critical features of the model include a non-monotonic relationship between recovery time during rhythmic stimulation and the state of membrane properties, and a steeply sloped recovery of membrane properties over certain ranges of recovery times.
  • (8) As subcritical crack velocities under cyclic loading were found to be many orders of magnitude faster than those measured under equivalent monotonic loads and to occur at typically 45% lower stress-intensity levels, cyclic fatigue in pyrolytic carbon-coated graphite is reasoned to be a vital consideration in the design and life-prediction procedures of prosthetic devices manufactured from this material.
  • (9) Pulsed-field electrophoresis experiments resulting in the establishment of an electrophoretic karyotype for yeast, where the mobility of the DNA fragments is a monotonic function of molecular size for the entire size range that is resolved (200-2200 kilobase pairs), has been compared to the theoretical mobility curves generated by the computer model.
  • (10) Input-output functions at inhibitory frequencies were nonmonotonic, while they were always monotonic at best frequencies near CF.
  • (11) Other consequences of increasing gNa+max were a decrease in the minimum sustainable rhythmic firing frequency (mRFF), a monotonic increase in firing frequency at any given suprathreshold stimulus intensity, an increase in the current value at which intense depolarizing stimuli block rhythmogenesis, an increase in the maximal sustainable firing frequency using intense currents (MRFF), and the consequent expansion of the dynamic range for stimulus encoding.
  • (12) The voltage dependences of the ON and OFF charges measured with these pulses were clearly different: QON had a maximum at or slightly above the contraction threshold, while QOFF increased monotonically in the voltage range examined.
  • (13) FNA smears from a lymph node in a patient with a previous histological diagnosis of lymphomatoid papulosis of the gingiva showed a monotonous pattern of large immunoblastic cells with some binucleated variants consistent with a diagnosis of high grade immunoblastic lymphoma, which was confirmed histologically.
  • (14) It is a monotonous, unreactive and anteriorly predominant activity of less than 50 microV and of 8 to 13 Hz.
  • (15) Several temporal principles that govern multisensory integration were revealed: (1) maximal levels of response enhancement were generated by overlapping the peak discharge periods evoked by each modality; (2) the magnitude of this enhancement decayed monotonically to zero as the peak discharge periods became progressively more temporally disparate; (3) with further increases in temporal disparity, the same stimulus combinations that previously produced enhancement could often produce depression; and (4) these kinds of interactions could frequently be predicted from the discharge trains initiated by each stimulus alone.
  • (16) Monotonic decreases in ambulation after tetrabenazine were not significantly affected in the rubidium-treated animals though the decreases were sometimes preceded by slight increases and recovery from the decrement tended to be more rapid.
  • (17) To estimate mechanical characteristics of such membranes, it is necessary to carry out the noncontact pressure test and membranous contact test, in addition to the usual monotonic tensile test, by using a rectangular specimen cut from the membranes.
  • (18) In cell-attached recordings the high-frequency component declined monotonically with increasing light intensity, suggesting that less than one-half of the channels are open in darkness.
  • (19) The strength of this genetic control, however, systematically diminished throughout the course of practice obeying a monotonic trend over trials.
  • (20) The open time had a monotonic mole fraction relationship in mixtures of Li+ and K+.