What is "dour"

Usage examples of "dour".

He was a silent, precise man with a dour nature and a hard Aberdonian accent.

The last time Faraday checked, Joyce had been married to a uniformed Inspector in the Southampton BCU, a dour Aberdonian with a roving eye and a passion for fitness routines.

She nodded at one of her dour Cassiline Guards, who held out an armload of gleaming steel.

Third, Bruno himself stuck in said inn for the rest of the day while his passenger goes off with a young Austrian witness to pursue his investigations -finally cracks up under the dour cloud of graceless silence and the glares of loathing lasered his way by the locals, and finally freaks out completely at a cafe where he and Zen stop on the way back down the mountain, screaming action ably offensive abuse at the stocky, stolid Teutonic blockheads who have made his life and those of all his fellow recruits a misery for months on end.

Shannon and the others chorused enthusiastically Even Jackson seemed to be caught up in the spirit of the occasion, the usually dour and antisocial cyberneticist grinning just as giddily at the rest of them.

Up in those dour towers, the original Flenser had done his experiments, written his essays .

The chief was a lean, spindly man, outwardly dour, but with a puckish sense of humor and who still talked in a broad Glaswegian accent, though for forty years he had been no nearer Scotland than an occasional Burns Night dinner in San Francisco.

The dour and guilty vision that characterized much of early nineteenth-century Hasidism was a far cry from the free and life-asserting proclamations of the Baal Shem Tov and the blissful singing of Levi of Berdichev.

The thought of finicky Lotte Dietrich, the dour old manhunter Cassius Potter, and laid-back Hector Motlaletsie carousing among the frozen fleshpots of Torngat made me smile.

As a result of those orders, three dour middle-aged professional Marines in a Marine helicopter were dispatched the same day to Pocahontas Island, in Pamlico Sound, North Carolina.

Glancing doubtfully at the artificial Capella fern beside Sev, they moved to the other side of the room and seated themselves well away from the strange, dour young man and his talking plant.

But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence.

From above the Boers were flooding down, as Churchill saw them, dour, resolute, riding silently through the rain, or chanting hymns round their camp fires--brave honest farmers, but standing unconsciously for mediaevalism and corruption, even as our rough-tongued Tommies stood for civilisation, progress, and equal rights for all men.

Dour and long-suffering the Boers made no reply, save with sporadic rifle-fire, and refused until the crisis should come to expose their great guns to the chance of injury.

Dour retained as leading counsel by the defendants among the seventeen law firms involved in the dispute.