gloomy
[gloo-mee]
- dark or dim; deeply shaded: gloomy skies.
- causing gloom; dismal or depressing: a gloomy prospect.
- filled with or showing gloom; sad, dejected, or melancholy.
- hopeless or despairing; pessimistic: a gloomy view of the future.
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Origin of gloomy
Synonyms
See more synonyms for gloomy on Thesaurus.com1. obscure, shadowy, dusky; lowering, threatening. 3. downcast, downhearted, despondent, depressed, glum, dispirited.
Synonym study
1. See dark.
Antonyms
3. happy.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for gloomy
Contemporary Examples
Yet this, in the end, is a book from which one emerges sad, gloomy, disenchanted, at least if we agree to take it seriously.
Houellebecq’s Incendiary Novel Imagines France With a Muslim PresidentPierre Assouline
January 9, 2015
The running machines are a gloomy chorus of heavy-footed stomping.
Hemingway wrote of crossing a stream into a “gloomy little village.”
The gloomy postmortem has begun, but team manager Roy Hodgson is not resigning.
I felt recharged on my trip —a vastly different feeling from years before, when life in early March became muted and gloomy.
Historical Examples
Horace Milbrey sits alone in his gloomy, high-ceilinged library.
The SpendersHarry Leon Wilson
No one knows what that man suffers; it makes him gloomy all the time about everything.
The SpendersHarry Leon Wilson
Dark pictures and gloomy forebodings are worse than useless.
He was silent, and almost as gloomy as Hiram Bartlett himself.
In the Midst of AlarmsRobert Barr
If your wife was sensitive, you would kill her with your gloomy fits.
In the Midst of AlarmsRobert Barr
gloomy
- dark or dismal
- causing depression, dejection, or gloomgloomy news
- despairing; sad
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Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Word Origin and History for gloomy
adj.
1580s, probably from gloom even though that word is not attested as early as this one is. Shakespeare used it of woods, Marlowe of persons. Gloomy Gus used in a general sense of "sullen person" since 1940s, from a comic strip character of that name first recorded 1904. Related: Gloomily; gloominess.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper