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What is "bleak"

Crossword clues for bleak

bleak
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
bleak
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a bleak/gloomy/grim picture (=giving the impression that something is or will be bad)
▪ The report paints a bleak picture of the economy.
bleak/grim/dark (=without anything to make you feel hopeful)
▪ The theatre is losing money and its future looks bleak.
face a bleak/grim etc future
▪ Many pensioners face a bleak future.
gloomy/grim/bleak
▪ Many Britons face the grim prospect of having their home repossessed.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
as
▪ Of course, the picture may not have been quite as bleak as all this might suggest.
▪ The room seemed to sum up his life: his future seemed as bleak as this cubicle.
▪ And doubting her husband on this point, she wondered if Timothy Gedge's future was as bleak as he had forecast.
▪ Prospects for the weeks and months ahead look about as bleak.
▪ The zoo curators at the conference had news that was almost as bleak.
▪ The situation in Ulster in 1985 was as bleak as ever.
▪ His face was as bleak as the frost.
even
▪ By the end of the week the prospect was even bleaker.
▪ The next cluster of ugly barracks surrounded by barbed wire would be even bleaker because it was unfamiliar.
▪ For Ricardo Ellcock, the picture is even bleaker.
▪ The bottom line is even bleaker.
▪ To the outward eye he was austere, even bleak.
very
▪ At the turn of the century, things looked very bleak for the Rottweiler.
▪ I wanted to be a newspaper man, but chances looked very bleak in those days for blacks to think about that.
▪ In 1950 the economic picture had looked very bleak.
▪ We should now have a very bleak and bare countryside.
■ NOUN
future
▪ But as she lapped up the five-star treatment on the champagne Concorde flight, angry pensioners were facing a bleak future.
▪ Like many of the black artists he mimicked, Presley grew up poor and with a seemingly bleak future.
▪ His marriage has broken up, he rarely sees his teenage daughter and he faces a bleak future.
▪ Now the hard working couple say they face a miserable Christmas and a bleak future.
▪ They say the airlift has brought new hope to people who would otherwise have faced a bleak future.
landscape
▪ After another mile, Chapel-le-Dale is reached, an oasis of greenery in a bleak landscape.
▪ The bleak landscape wouldn't be different at all.
▪ The bleak landscape made Zen think back to his dream, to his own father's fate.
picture
▪ But here, too, recent analysis presents a bleaker picture than that of the traditional liberal view.
▪ Doctors stop short of saying the disease is always fatal, but medical literature paints a bleak picture.
▪ He writes: This seems to be an unnecessarily bleak picture.
▪ The imagery and language help conjure up the bleak picture of death in the two poems.
▪ He remembered their talk together and the bleak picture she had painted for him of her life.
prospect
▪ Myriad receptions and reunions could not disguise the bleak prospects for job hunters.
▪ It may well be this bleak prospect that has spawned the flurry of books about Yiddish in recent years.
▪ The bleak prospect of the labour camps, slavery in Siberia?
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ He gazed around the empty, bleak little room in despair.
▪ His prospects of finding another job are bleak.
▪ It looks pretty bleak for avocado growers here.
▪ Many people were facing a financially bleak Christmas.
▪ Prospects of success looked bleak as the opposition scored the first two goals.
▪ the bleakest year of the Depression
▪ The chief executive said that the company was looking at a bleak future.
▪ The future looked bleak for the Democratic party.
▪ The snow-covered coast looked bleak and uninviting.
▪ The wild landscape was bleak and bare.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ For savers, the picture probably will get bleaker.
▪ It could have shared the owner's adventures and vicissitudes, occupied his leisure hours, cheered his bleaker moments.
▪ Maybe in the bleak light of dawn Kathy arranged a pile of twigs on the beach.
▪ Only an occasional ferry boat makes a last, bleak journey across the river to Birkenhead and the Wirral.
▪ The Chicago settings are authentically bleak and the plotting subtle and incisive.
▪ Things began to look pretty bleak, from the standpoint of building a career.
▪ This is the wildest, bleakest and least densely populated area of Ulthuan.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bleak

Bleak \Bleak\, n. [From Bleak, a., cf. Blay.] (Zo["o]l.) A small European river fish ( Leuciscus alburnus), of the family Cyprinid[ae]; the blay. [Written also blick.]

Note: The silvery pigment lining the scales of the bleak is used in the manufacture of artificial pearls.
--Baird.

Bleak

Bleak \Bleak\ (bl[=e]k), a. [OE. blac, bleyke, bleche, AS. bl[=a]c, bl[=ae]c, pale, wan; akin to Icel. bleikr, Sw. blek, Dan. bleg, OS. bl[=e]k, D. bleek, OHG. pleih, G. bleich; all from the root of AS. bl[=i]can to shine; akin to OHG. bl[=i]chen to shine; cf. L. flagrare to burn, Gr. fle`gein to burn, shine, Skr. bhr[=a]j to shine, and E. flame. [root]98. Cf. Bleach, Blink, Flame.]

  1. Without color; pale; pallid. [Obs.]

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

  2. Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.

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

    At daybreak, on the bleak sea beach.
    --Longfellow.

  3. Cold and cutting; cheerless; as, a bleak blast. [1913 Webster] -- Bleak"ish, a. -- Bleak"ly, adv. -- Bleak"ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
bleak

c.1300, "pale," from Old Norse bleikr "pale, whitish, blond," from Proto-Germanic *blaika- "shining, white," from PIE root *bhel- (1) "to shine, flash, burn" (see bleach (v.)). Later "bare, windswept" (1530s). Sense of "cheerless" is c.1719 figurative extension. The same Germanic root produced Old English blac "pale," but this died out, probably from confusion with blæc "black;" however bleak persisted, with a sense of "bare" as well as "pale."

Wiktionary
bleak

Etymology 1 a. 1 Without color; pale; pallid. 2 desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds. 3 unhappy; cheerless; miserable; emotionally desolate. Etymology 2

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

WordNet
bleak

  1. adj. offering little or no hope; "the future looked black"; "prospects were bleak"; "Life in the Aran Islands has always been bleak and difficult"- J.M.Synge; "took a dim view of things" [syn: black, dim]

  2. providing no shelter or sustenance; "bare rocky hills"; "barren lands"; "the bleak treeless regions of the high Andes"; "the desolate surface of the moon"; "a stark landscape" [syn: bare, barren, desolate, stark]

  3. unpleasantly cold and damp; "bleak winds of the North Atlantic" [syn: cutting, raw]

Wikipedia
Bleak

Bleak may refer to:

Fish

  • Species of the genus Alburnus
  • Alburnoides bipunctatus, also known as the schneider

Music

  • "Bleak", a song by Opeth from Blackwater Park
  • "Bleak", a song by Soulfly on Dark Ages
  • Bleak (band), Finnish rock band

People

  • David B. Bleak, decorated US soldier of the Korean War
Bleak (band)

Bleak is a Finnish rock band formed in 1997 and split in 2009. Bleak is now known as Fireal.

Bleak stuck strictly to grunge during the first years of its career. The new millennium saw the band take a short breather, but Bleak regrouped in 2002, armed with a new, broader musical outlook. Today, the band's music is supposedly a reflection of the eternally bleak ethos of the band members, coated with an earthy penchant for melody, all served continental style.

The band worked on a grass roots level for some time, and their self-financed single 'Crossword' was in rotation at several rock radio stations. Radio airplay and live performances gave them the beginnings of a solid fanbase. Asko Kallonen and Niko Nordström from Helsinki Music Company took an interest in the band and soon signed Bleak. The first fruits of the new partnership came in the form of the single 'Play', which debuted on the official Finnish singles chart at number 2. The song also found its way to the playlists of both Radio City and YleX.

Bleak recorded the album '[Burns Inside]' at the same time that Ana Johnsson was recording the album ' Little Angel' in Finland, this resulted in their collaboration for the main song for the Jadesoturi (Jade Warrior) movie " Fate" the song received the award for 'Best Nordic Song' at the NRJ Radio Awards in 2007.

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.