Stark; barren; dreary

Usage examples of bleak.

After eight long years of pain and fear, she now knew why her body turned traitor on her, beginning with an overwhelming arousal and ending with a bleak, almost agonizing pain before slowly diminishing.

He dragged on his aketon and scale mail and reached for his sword, and his face was bleak.

A bleak, copper-colored landscape set against a deep-pink sky through which wisps of anhydrous white clouds drifted.

For my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting or the wilful transmission of contagious disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and ignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel.

Winter to finish the thought, but turned to follow Deputy Bleaker out of the room.

Each new reality they entered seemed bleaker than the last, even as it took them further and further from safety, and away from the people who were depending on their success.

What good is a shimmering new skyline when the streets below it are bleaker than ever?

The winter of 1822 was passed in Pisa, if we might call that season winter in which autumn merged into spring after the interval of but few days of bleaker weather.

Security Team Two reporting two possibles have just entered a jewelry store on the fourteenth block of Bleaker Street.

But as the situation becomes bleaker and bleaker, the still fragile alliance between these long-hostile lands begins to fray.

Now they seemed almost to relish the worst, greeting each new privation with black humor and joyful predictions of even bleaker things in store.

It is like a fire that flares up brilliantly for a while and then leaves everything blacker and bleaker than before.

We followed the other buses over a bridge and into a bleaker landscape, dryer, stonier, with less vegetation, just scattered thorn-bushes for the most part, dotted across low but steep and irregular hills.

But on the tops of the Chocolate and Chuckwalla ranges no snow fell, although the winter wind sometimes blew cold and bleak.

A chill, wet October afternoon was merging into a bleak, wet October evening, and the club smoking-room seemed warmer and cosier by contrast.