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The state of being desolated or laid waste; ruin; solitariness; destitution; gloominess. You would have sold your king to slaughter, . . . And his whole kingdom into desolation. Shak.

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. Goldsmith. A dismal description of an English November. Southey.…

In a dismal manner; gloomily; sorrowfully; uncomfortably.

The quality of being dismal; gloominess.

Doleful; dismal; gloomy; sorrowful. -- Dole"some*ly, adv. -- Dole"some*ness, n.

Having a downcast countenance; dejected; gloomy; sullen. [R.] Dryden.

te; unmixed; as, downright atheism. The downright impossibilities charged upon it. South. Gloomy fancies which in her amounted to downright insanity. Prescott. -- Down"right`ly, adv. -- Down"right`ness, n.

spiring dread; impressing great fear; fearful; terrible; as, a dreadful storm. " Dreadful gloom." Milton. For all things are less dreadful than they seem. Wordsworth.

Dismal; gloomy with solitude. "A drear and dying sound." Milton.

Gloomily; dismally.

Dismalness; gloomy solitude.

Exciting cheerless sensations, feelings, or associations; comfortless; dismal; gloomy. " Dreary shades." Dryden. "The dreary ground." Prior. Full many a dreary anxious hour. Keble. Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of that dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Macaulay.…

Furnishing little delight, spirit, or variety; uninteresting; tedious; cheerless; gloomy; melancholy; depressing; as, a dull story or sermon; a dull occupation or period; hence, cloudy; overcast; as, a dull day. Along life's dullest, dreariest walk. Keble.

Having a gloomy look.

A dull, gloomy state of the mind; sadness; melancholy; low spirits; despondency; ill humor; -- now used only in the plural. March slowly on in solemn dump. Hudibras. Doleful dumps the mind oppress. Shak. I was musing in the midst of my dumps. Bunyan.

Gloomy; sad; melancholy. This dusky scene of horror, this melancholy prospect. Bentley.

porary or partial, of light, brilliancy, luster, honor, consciousness, etc.; obscuration; gloom; darkness. All the posterity of our fist parents suffered a perpetual eclipse of spiritual life. Sir W. Raleigh. As in the soft and sweet eclipse, When soul meets soul on lovers' lips. Shelley. Annular eclipse. (Astron.) See…

tance; issue; efflux. Bright effluence of bright essence increate! Milton. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. Hawthorne.

A splay of a door or window. Apart, in the twilight gloom of a window's embrasure, Sat the lovers. Longfellow.

A cincture. [Poetic] The vast encincture of that gloomy sea. Wordsworth.