How to Use bleak in a Sentence

bleak

adjective
  • First, though, things looked bleak.
    — Kansas City Star, 27 Apr. 2026
  • Thus far, things have been bleak.
    — Gabe Smallson, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Oct. 2025
  • The mood is bleak; the man is high.
    — Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker, 30 Aug. 2025
  • The rest of the episode is bleak as hell.
    — Maggie Fremont, Vulture, 23 Feb. 2026
  • So what’s to be done when things look bleak?
    — Ryan Ermey, CNBC, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Life as a Browns fan has been bleak.
    — Jacob Robinson, New York Times, 26 May 2026
  • For many, the outcome is bleak.
    — Maria Azzurra Volpe, MSNBC Newsweek, 2 Sep. 2025
  • The room is dark, bleak, drained of color.
    — Literary Hub, 29 Apr. 2026
  • That outlook seems quite bleak.
    — Charlotte Observer, 14 Oct. 2025
  • This year, though, is things are looking bleak.
    — Alan Gionet, CBS News, 4 June 2026
  • This year’s job market has been bleak, to say the least.
    — Sydney Lake, Fortune, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Not all the news in the park's report on the fires was bleak.
    — Fox News, 20 Nov. 2021
  • Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts.
    — Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 2 Jan. 2026
  • Yet, while one side of the street is bleak, the other is chic.
    — Andrew J. Campa, Los Angeles Times, 5 May 2024
  • The outlook is bleak for Spurs.
    — Graham Ruthven, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2026
  • That’s a bleak thing for Shakespeare to tell us.
    — Helen Shaw, New Yorker, 22 Aug. 2025
  • Chubb got hurt on the Browns' next drive, and things looked bleak at first.
    — cleveland, 4 Oct. 2020
  • In the short term, thinks look bleak for Biden and Democrats.
    — Eli Stokolsstaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 15 Apr. 2022
  • The idea of her not surviving felt too bleak.
    — Demetrius Patterson, HollywoodReporter, 18 Mar. 2026
  • In other words, the status quo of ed tech is bleak.
    — Will Oremus, The Atlantic, 16 May 2026
  • The business of hockey was bleak for this team.
    — Matthew Fairburn, New York Times, 19 May 2026
  • And the past few days haven’t been entirely bleak of him.
    — Niall Stanage, The Hill, 5 Sep. 2025
  • The same brush painted the bleak picture for both schools.
    — David Eckert, Austin American Statesman, 30 Jan. 2026
  • The world seems bleak to many of us who are self-quarantined.
    — Abigail Van Buren, oregonlive, 11 Dec. 2020
  • Despite the win, Lee knows that long-term prospects are bleak.
    — Max Kim, Los Angeles Times, 8 May 2023
  • Despite the bleak findings of the study, not all hope is lost.
    — Fox News, 4 Mar. 2020
  • But appeals are rarely granted, and the end of the road is bleak.
    — Lara Bazelon, The New Republic, 24 Mar. 2023
  • The chances of making the playoff field looked bleak at that point.
    — Jordan McPherson, Miami Herald, 7 Jan. 2026
  • The current state of the world right now is pretty bleak in a lot of ways.
    — Liz Appel, Vogue, 13 Feb. 2024
  • There was an overhang of dread and fear over the bleak future in front of us.
    — Jack Kelly, Forbes, 14 June 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bleak.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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