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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dismal
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
abject/dismal failure (=used to emphasize how bad a failure is)
▪ The experiment was considered a dismal failure.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
failure
▪ Jimmy Johnstone's life after football has been a catalogue of defeats and dismal failures.
▪ This debate will no doubt continue, and clearly no project is either a complete success or a dismal failure.
▪ It was a dismal failure. 1926-27 found him hawking a play round London offices with no potential takers.
▪ They are especially dismal failures in this regard because in fact they support these prejudices.
▪ It was a dismal failure, and was followed by restrictive legislation against the unions and by victimization of many union activists.
performance
▪ Is this because of that dismal performance against Norwich?
▪ But the dismal performance in Boston will make many fans think our top players are overvalued and overpaid.
▪ In a country so used to dismal performances the prospect of a player scoring with such consummate style was rare indeed.
▪ Coleraine boss Billy Sinclair must have shuddered as he watched his side's dismal performance.
record
▪ Over the decades, the economic summits have had a dismal record of understanding what was happening in the real world.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
dismal economic news
▪ a dismal, gray afternoon
▪ It was a grey, dismal November afternoon.
▪ Melinda joined her husband in Moscow, but soon found life there bleak and dismal.
▪ The couple lived in a dismal apartment in the poorest section of town.
▪ The profit margin on hardware sales for the first quarter was a dismal 29%.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But it was a dismal moment for the pastry shop that Majed Makhoul had opened two months earlier in Qlaia.
▪ I understood that things could have been far more dismal than they were.
▪ Instead there would be the dismal apparatus of mutual suspicion familiar to every accountant.
▪ It looked dismal enough when I saw it, as if given right over to darkness.
▪ The forecast had been dismal but wrong.
▪ Visitors to the camps went home with dismal stories to relate....
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dismal

Dismal \Dis"mal\, a. [Formerly a noun; e. g., ``I trow it was in the dismalle.'' Chaucer. Of uncertain origin; but perh. (as suggested by Skeat) from OF. disme, F. d[^i]me, tithe, the phrase dismal day properly meaning, the day when tithes must be paid. See Dime.]

  1. Fatal; ill-omened; unlucky. [Obs.]

    An ugly fiend more foul than dismal day.
    --Spenser.

  2. Gloomy to the eye or ear; sorrowful and depressing to the feelings; foreboding; cheerless; dull; dreary; as, a dismal outlook; dismal stories; a dismal place.

    Full well the busy whisper, circling round, Convey'd the dismal tidings when he frowned.
    --Goldsmith.

    A dismal description of an English November.
    --Southey.

    Syn: Dreary; lonesome; gloomy; dark; ominous; ill-boding; fatal; doleful; lugubrious; funereal; dolorous; calamitous; sorrowful; sad; joyless; melancholy; unfortunate; unhappy.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dismal

c.1400, from Anglo-French dismal (mid-13c.), from Old French (li) dis mals "(the) bad days," from Medieval Latin dies mali "evil or unlucky days" (also called dies Ægyptiaci), from Latin dies "days" (see diurnal) + mali, plural of malus "bad" (see mal-).\n

\nThrough the Middle Ages, calendars marked two days of each month as unlucky, supposedly based on the ancient calculations of Egyptian astrologers (Jan. 1, 25; Feb. 4, 26; March 1, 28; April 10, 20; May 3, 25; June 10, 16; July 13, 22; Aug. 1, 30; Sept. 3, 21; Oct. 3, 22; Nov. 5, 28; Dec. 7, 22). Modern sense of "gloomy, dreary" first recorded in English 1590s, in reference to sounds. Related: Dismally.

Wiktionary
dismal

a. Disappointingly inadequate.

WordNet
dismal
  1. adj. depressing in character or appearance; "drove through dingy streets"; "the dismal prison twilight"- Charles Dickens; "drab old buildings"; "a dreary mining town"; "gloomy tenements"; "sorry routine that follows on the heels of death"- B.A.Williams [syn: dingy, drab, drear, dreary, gloomy, sorry]

  2. causing dejection; "a blue day"; "the dark days of the war"; "a week of rainy depressing weather"; "a disconsolate winter landscape"; "the first dismal dispiriting days of November"; "a dark gloomy day"; "grim rainy weather" [syn: blue, dark, depressing, disconsolate, dispiriting, gloomy, grim]

Usage examples of "dismal".

Before him were Bruce and Diamond, Rattleton and Dismal Jones, Bink and Danny, and through the half-open door leading into the office he also caught a glimpse of Elsie Bellwood and Bernard Burrage.

There was a tolerably dismal specimen of bistrot down the side street.

Besides being an exceedingly spacious and dismal brick building, with a dismal iron railing in front, and long, dismal, thin windows, with little panes of glass, it looked out into the churchyard, where, time out of mind, between two yew-trees, one of which is cut into the form of a peacock, while the other represents a dumb-waiter, it looked into the churchyard where the monument of the late Bluebeard was placed over the family vault.

In the shadow of a neighbouring bush Captain Scraggs babbled of steam beer in the Bowhead saloon, and the commodore, stifling his own agony, watched his comrades until their lips and tongues, parched with thirst, refused longer to produce even a moan, and silence settled over the dismal camp.

So journeyed this strangely assorted couple down to old Fort Selkirk, then through fivescore miles of dismal wilderness to Stuart River.

The Hares, when they came up, set down their packs and broke into a dismal howling, which seemed to be meant for a chant.

While about Merriwell swarmed his friends tried and true, with Hodge, Browning, Diamond, Rattleton, Gamp, Bink, and Dismal close to his person.

They move shipments up the Intracoastal through the Dismal Swamp Canal and into Norfolk.

They move shipments up the Intracoastal through the Dismal Swamp Canal and into Norfolk .

They believed there was a dismal empire in the earth where the rephaim, or ghosts of the dead, reposed forever in a state of semi sleep.

Go and take a ride to cheer you up after all this dismal talk, and get back your roses before luncheon time.

Rain slid tearily down the windowpanes, blurring the garden into a gray dismal landscape of bare trees and withered vines.

The toil, the thirst, the dangers of the way, were forgotten, as the traveller recalled the fearful catastrophe which had converted into an arid and dismal wilderness the fair and fertile valley of Siddim, once well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, now a parched and blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility.

Nightly, arrayed in deep black from head to foot, he traverses the dismal zones of the damned, where they undergo appropriate retributions.

And in the mire to leave him, till the stars are all burnt out, While, in strange-looking shapes, they frisk about the ground, And, afar in the woods, they raise a dismal shout, Till I shrink into my cell again for terror of the sound!