DISMAL • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Dismal

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/dˈɪzməl/ Listen

adjective

Dismal adj.

Fatal; ill-omened; unlucky. (Obs.) "An ugly fiend more foul than dismal day."

Gloomy to the eye or ear; sorrowful and depressing to the feelings; foreboding; cheerless; dull; dreary; as, a dismal outlook; dismal stories; a dismal place. "Full well the busy whisper, circling round, Convey'd the dismal tidings when he frowned." "A dismal description of an English November."

Synonyms: Dreary; lonesome; gloomy; dark; ominous; ill-boding; fatal; doleful; lugubrious; funereal; dolorous; calamitous; sorrowful; sad; joyless; melancholy; unfortunate; unhappy.

See images of 'Dismal'

Etymology of 'Dismal'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books

... of Constantine the Great must be referred the commencement of those dark and dismal times which oppressed Europe for a thousand years. It is the true close of the Roman empire, the beginning of the Greek. The transition from one to the other is emphatically and abruptly marked by a new metropolis, a new religion, a new code, ...

— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... home, soon after our engagement, for his annual visit. He was succeeding rather better than his dismal fancies had once prognosticated. He was very often at our house,—very much my friend. I saw through all that clearly enough; I knew he loved me a hundred-fold more passionately than in our earlier days; and the knowledge was to me as ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... the drifts, the snowy clifts[32-8] Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— The ice ...

— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... was inhuman and isolating whether there were room on my carts. Then the body would be lifted up; there would be muttered directions, the wounded man would cry, then the other wounded would also cry—after that, there would be the dismal silence again, silence broken only by the shrapnel and the heavy plopping smothers of the rain. But it was myself upon whom my eyes were fixed, myself, a miserable figure, the rain dripping from me, slipping down my neck, squelching under my boots. And as I stood there ...

— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... Holls to Delft, five miles, and attended service at the "New Church." The building was noble, but the service seemed very crude and dismal, nearly the whole of it consisting of two long sermons separated by hymns, ...

— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

More quotes...