dreary
Americanadjective
-
causing sadness or gloom.
- Synonyms:
- comfortless, depressing, cheerless, drear, dismal, gloomy
- Antonyms:
- cheerful
-
dull; boring.
- Synonyms:
- tiresome, wearisome, monotonous, tedious
- Antonyms:
- interesting
-
sorrowful; sad.
adjective
-
sad or dull; dismal
-
wearying; boring
-
archaic miserable
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of dreary
before 900; Middle English drery, Old English drēorig gory, cruel, sad, equivalent to drēor gore + -ig -y 1; akin to Old Norse dreyrigr bloody, German traurig sad
Explanation
When something is dreary it's depressing or lifeless in a rainy-day way. I finished my work, there was nothing on TV, and the rain just wouldn't stop: what a dreary day! Dreary can refer to a feeling, a place, a time, or even a thing. It sounds a little like a combination of "drizzle" and "teary," and that's not a bad way to remember what it means. My grandmother's house was a dreary affair: run down, poorly lit, and silent but for the buzz of the fluorescent light in the cramped kitchen. Some might call the recession a depression: I call it dreary, either way. If the economy remains dreary like this much longer, I just might move to China.
Vocabulary lists containing dreary
100 SAT Words Beginning with "D"
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This Week in Words: September 4 - 8, 2017
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
He managed his way through all of that, even when his team were putting in dreary performances.
From BBC ● Jun. 11, 2026
A period of dreary, windy, cool weather is settling across Southern California this week, as a cold system from the Pacific Northwest moves south.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 26, 2026
Trust me when I say that this pasta is the perfect meal to end a dreary, months-long hibernation and welcome spring with open arms.
From Salon ● May 1, 2026
After Harvard Law and a dreary turn as a tax attorney, he joined the rough-and-tumble New York commodities firm J. Aron.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 20, 2026
It was a dreary afternoon that followed a dreary and silent dinner.
From "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary D. Schmidt
It is a drearier and less-plausible dream than Mr. Lindsey admits.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 2, 2026
Allen closed his essay emphasizing the significance of Keaton’s death: “A few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton. Now it’s a world that does not. Hence it’s a drearier world.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2025
He added that the world was now a "drearier" place without her in it.
From BBC ● Oct. 13, 2025
They made the pedestrian plaza in the back even drearier.
From New York Times ● Dec. 5, 2018
If Courtney and Jupiter take notice of my drearier demeanor post-field-trip-and-photo-discovery, neither lets on.
From "Odd One Out" by Nic Stone
And as an already sleep deprived, anxiety attack-prone person facing the darkest, dreariest season of the year, I figured it was worth a shot to try to nourish my way to a better attitude.
From Salon ● Dec. 25, 2023
"The problem with Pixar's latest feature isn't just that it's the animation house's dullest, dreariest, most spiritually empty to date. It's that it fails even on its own painstakingly contrived open-goal terms."
From BBC ● Jun. 14, 2022
After losing his bid for speaker, De León was stripped of his Appropriations chairmanship and relegated to one of the dreariest offices in the state Capitol.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 30, 2022
The rest of this 86-minute schlep, however, nestles deep into Drake’s dreariest comfort zone: a deeply aggrieved, impossibly paranoid place where nobody loves a global superstar.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 7, 2021
Turner knew from the map there were another seven miles, and once they were on the move again, they were the hardest, the dreariest they had walked that day.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
