BLEAK • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Bleak

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adjective

Bleak adj.

Without color; pale; pallid. (Obs.) "When she came out she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead."

Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds. "Wastes too bleak to rear The common growth of earth, the foodful ear." "At daybreak, on the bleak sea beach."

Cold and cutting; cheerless; as, a bleak blast.

noun

Bleak n. (Written also blick) (Zool.) A small European river fish (Leuciscus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae; the blay. Note: The silvery pigment lining the scales of the bleak is used in the manufacture of artificial pearls.

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Etymology of 'Bleak'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books

... a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir ...

— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself more and more ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... presently became a haunter of the tree-clad valleys, of the prattling brooks with the meadowsweet drooping over them, and of the lone, bleak hills where the ...

— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... wayside gardens heavy-laden with golden fruit. Tall accacias a mass of canary colored bloom. Opulent palms shivering against a gray sky. Close mountains green and dense with forest trees, their crests filagreed with redwoods. Far mountains lifting their bleak ridges above bare brown hills thirsting ...

— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... of the saw-toothed peaks of El Diablo. Under the warmth of his gaze, the white-fleeced clouds wavered, shifting about uncertainly. As if loath to leave the devil-island they had guarded throughout the long night, they contracted slowly, niggardly exposing a line of rugged cliffs which shone bleak and gray in the ...

— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

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