Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Dreary.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Dreary.
- n. Dread; dismalness; grief; sorrow; dreadfulness.
Wiktionary
- adj. poetic Dreary.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Dismal; gloomy with solitude.
- n. obsolete Sadness; dismalness.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. causing dejection
Etymologies
- Shortening of dreary. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“With all this she was happier than she knew, and after Shelley's death she exclaims, with tragic conviction, "Alas! having lived day by day with one of the wisest, best, and most affectionate of spirits, how void, bare, and drear is the scene of life!”
“Nothing lifts London like emerging from the drear winter clampdown into the freshness of early spring.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Difficult Art of Inspiring Olympians
“Here in Providence, it's rainy and drear and chilly and windy.”
“Places on the eastern slope of the dramatically rising high Mexican Central Plain are subject to climate modifications brought on by the proximity of the Gulf of Mexico so in places such as Xalapa look for much cloudy coastal drizzle and drear.”
“Their thick winter coats are heavy with water, making dark and drear their dry shades of greyish-brown hair.”
“Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping and feeding and noise.”
“So the woman went forth on the hills of God to do battle for the King, on that drear day in the land of the Heavy Laden, when the heathen raged and imagined a vain thing.”
“The festival began during the drear days of the Bush administration, a group of the most tone-deaf, word-challenged, and brutish politicians as we've ever had to endure in this country.”
The Huffington Post: John Feffer: Fela: Music Is Still the Weapon
“Instead, this series serves up something perhaps even more welcome as the drear days of winter settle in: an absurdist take on crime, as well as plotlines and sentences that perform buoyant loop-de-loops all over the page before making flawless landings.”
The Washington Post: Joseph Wambaugh's latest: Loopy theatrics and lyrical language
“I was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘drear’.
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EN - archaic words
abide, abjure, abroad, adamant, afield, aforetime, aghast, anon, apace, argent, assuage, aught and 328 more...
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WF - list of EN back-formations
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_back-formations
aborigine, accrete, acculturate, admix, admixture, adolesce, adsorb, adulate, advect, aesthete, air-condition, anticline and 212 more...
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Words That Can Be Typed Entirely With...
Words made of the following: qwertasdfgzxcvb. I've stood on the shoulders of giants... users mollusque and reesetee made similar lists before I even existed on Wordnik. :)
stewardesses, red tea, waves, axes, wrest, qat, waver, created, dressed, stress, crater, vexes and 50 more...
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miscellany
extrapolate, effluvium, maelstrom, ecclesiastic, potentiate, prestidigitation, verisimilitude, innocuous, octogenarian, interlocutor, proselytize, ubiquitous and 138 more...
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Baby Got Back-Formations
"A new word created by removing an affix from an already existing word, as vacuum clean from vacuum cleaner, or by removing what is mistakenly thought to be an affix, as pea from the earlier Englis...
resurrect, enthuse, couth, donate, emote, greed, isolate, manipulate, orate, prequel, spectate, upholster and 94 more...
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play words
words for a play
pert, vicissitude, melancholy, vexation, gaud, attestation, renunciation, wax, wrought, sunder, antipodes, reckoning and 236 more...
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english
gullet, boon, vixen, squalor, mire, revelry, levy, embossed, revulsion, vanquish, snivel, milksop and 84 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for drear.

bilby "He scanned the will. 'The Ol Njorowa Foundation stands to inherit about thirty-four million pounds. I wonder what it does?' He sat down. 'Alix, what's this with you and Dirk? You sounded a shade drear on the phone this morning.'"
- 'Windfall', Desmond Bagley. Jan 6, 2008