bleak

comparative bleaker · superlative bleakest

1. Without color; pale; pallid.

   When she came out she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead.

   1563 March 30 (Gregorian calendar), John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, […], London: […] Iohn Day, […], →OCLC

   Synonyms: pasty, sallow, ashen, ashen-faced, ashy, blake, blanched, bloodless

2. Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.

   a bleak and bare rock

   5 more examples

   a bleak, crater-pocked moonscape

   They escaped across the bleak landscape.

   We hiked across open meadows and climbed bleak mountains.

   Wastes too bleak to rear / The common growth of earth, the foodful ear.

   1793, William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches

   At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, / A fisherman stood aghast, / To see the form of a maiden fair, / Lashed close to a drifting mast.

   1840 January 10, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Ballads.] w:The Wreck of the Hesperus.”, in Ballads and Other Poems, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1842, →OCLC, stanza 20, page 47

3. Unhappy; cheerless; miserable; emotionally desolate.

   The news is bleak.

   5 more examples

   Downtown Albany felt bleak that February after the divorce.

   A bleak future is in store for you.

   The survey paints a bleak picture.

   But the bleakest Utopia of all, the very first of the Unutopias, had come from Wells long before that.

   1978, The Spectator, volume 240, number 1, page 25

   The industrial shitscape of Los Angeles gave way to something even bleaker as I passed out of lonely Riverside into the wide-open range of horse stables and twisted trees and spinning giant wind turbines outside of Indio.

   2011, Jesse James, American Outlaw, page 331

   Synonyms: dismal, lugubrious, cheerless, comfortless, dark, morose, depressing, desolate

plural bleaks

1. A small European river fish (Alburnus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae.

   Synonyms: sea chameleon, ablet, alburn, blay