What is "humdrum"

Usage examples of "humdrum".

Despite a conservative training--or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown--he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in the sky.

The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there, continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even misadventure, jostling at his elbow.

Thus the months glided rapidly and serenely away, and he was positively happy in a mode of life that he once would have characterized as odiously humdrum.

A love of ornamentation defied poverty and broke out in an unexpected archway, an unpremeditated fountain in a narrow court, a flight of wrought-iron balconies, capable of lifting the spirits even of the humdrum.

Were it so, the festival would have no meaning, for what else is it but the ultimate negation of all the petty nonfulfillments of humdrum, everyday life?

Men who had been confined to cities, chained to dull and humdrum toils, stagnating in the noisy haunts, sore and sick and deflated, standing for some impossible end, when let loose in the grey, iron-walled barrens of the desert were caught by a subtle and insidious enchantment that transfigured some, made beasts of most, and mysteriously bound all.

Hither came no payers of formal calls, no leavers of cards, no pests from the humdrum world to open their mouths and utter foolishness.

A composite feeling, made up of disgust with the, to him, humdrum tediousness of a farmer’s life, gloomy images of her who lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a general averseness to his wife’s society, impelled him to seek a home in any place on earth save Weatherbury.

A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less lifeaffirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life- affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

He would sell everything humdrum and buy ancient tools at barn auctions and flea markets, until the shop resembled a nineteenth-century inventor's workroom and he could sit inhaling a combination of machine oil and wood and oxidizing iron, his favorite smells.

He had no idea what had happened, but it was a lot more exciting than the humdrum piece of nuclear engineering that had started the whole business.

Hildy Johnson's intrusion had jogged his memory on the subject, so he refiled the story-arc analysis and brought up the brainstorming-session minutes, a series of memos ranging from the humdrum to the impractical, with the solid ideas usually buried somewhere in the middle.

This necessity was incidentally so great that it permitted, he believed as part of his self-set rules, the use of outwardly perceptible and testifiable magic and need not be puttied over with realism, as in the case of more humdrum beings.