Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Elves were never a personal favorite, mostly because they're so dourly intense.

From Salon • Oct. 3, 2022

A fantastic miniseries has arrived that at last fully tells the painful history of being gay in modern America — and no, silly, it’s not ABC’s dourly dutiful “When We Rise.”

From Washington Post • Mar. 2, 2017

Surprisingly, the musical’s most eloquent scene was not the eponymous dream ballet but this razzmatazz number performed by Max von Essen, as Henri, an aspiring crooner and repressed homosexual with dourly puritanical parents.

From The New Yorker • Dec. 17, 2015

The landscape out here is dourly spectacular: the clouds shift over fields of slate grey and brilliant yellow gorse.

From The Guardian • Nov. 16, 2015

A few old men sat on the benches underneath the bare trees, looking dourly toward the blank gray sky overhead.

From "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke