How to Use lugubrious in a Sentence

lugubrious

adjective
  • The lugubrious creature surfaced next to the boat, cut across the bow, dived, then reemerged.
    — Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, 26 June 2024
  • Brass plug in their mutes and lugubrious quarter tones reign in a bluesy, and much welcome, moment of respite.
    — Hannah Edgar, chicagotribune.com, 2 Nov. 2021
  • So do many of the images, the lugubrious pace and the direction throughout.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 18 Nov. 2021
  • So do many of the images, the lugubrious pace and the direction throughout.
    — WSJ, 9 Feb. 2022
  • In fact, the only way to tell river from field was to stare at the river and sense its lugubrious vector.
    — Will MacKin, The New Yorker, 5 June 2017
  • Based on the first two episodes, the pace is overly lugubrious and the poverty, crime and corruption are laid on with a heavy hand.
    — Kristi Turnquist | The Oregonian/oregonlive, OregonLive.com, 26 Jan. 2018
  • Meanwhile, the production’s lugubrious strings and club-level bass open up new chasms beneath her.
    — New York Times, 23 July 2021
  • Their happy haberdashery stands in sharp contrast to their lugubrious lyrics.
    — David Holahan, Hartford Courant, 2 Feb. 2024
  • Every episode from there got longer and more lugubrious, weighed down by franchise canon and relentless plot incident.
    — Darren Franich, EW.com, 5 Mar. 2021
  • Too often, performances of this selection are lugubrious and heavy.
    — Luke Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Nov. 2022
  • The original lobby and sky lobby are both gone and, with them, Johnson’s sense of lugubrious grandeur.
    — Curbed, 2 Nov. 2022
  • What should be soaring is instead lugubrious; what should be a ripping good yarn is instead dutiful and a little bit dull.
    — Ann Hornaday, Houston Chronicle, 30 Oct. 2019
  • Despite its lugubrious atmosphere, the characters’ problems could now be cleared up with some penicillin and, say, a book club.
    — Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, 13 Mar. 2025
  • That bravura gesture marked a rare bit of genuine excitement on a night when there were few surprises and the tone was low-key to the point of lugubrious.
    — Washington Post, 26 Apr. 2021
  • An unforgiving, industrial glare does little to stave off the lugubrious solitude of night.
    — Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 2018
  • The pop approach to music and politics is no less solemn than the lugubrious 1982 biopic Gandhi.
    — Armond White, National Review, 16 Feb. 2024
  • Cancer House make downer music with the same allure, where all things lugubrious offer a strange, addictive solace.
    — Joshua Minsoo Kim, Pitchfork, 13 Apr. 2026
  • The boom-and-bust border economy birthed a lugubrious landscape where homes suffer water shortages and bodies of missing persons turn up.
    — New York Times, 23 Mar. 2022
  • Same, too, with the lugubrious dance of the conclave itself, with its round after round of balloting and tallying and quiet reflecting.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 25 Oct. 2024
  • Four Spent the Day Together is a flat, at times lugubrious account of losing such conviction.
    — Victor J. Blue, Harpers Magazine, 23 Nov. 2025
  • Four Spent the Day Together is a flat, at times lugubrious account of losing such conviction.
    — Rosa Lyster, Harpers Magazine, 30 Dec. 2025
  • The story is lugubrious enough without including this dirgelike music to punish the audience.
    — Stephen Farber, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Sep. 2017
  • An English horn then doubles the singer as the other winds unfold that lugubrious kaleidoscope of disconnected chords.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2022
  • The prose is precise, pristine, moving always at the same lugubrious pace, but nevertheless the reader feels swept up, carried along, in a slow, mighty current.
    — Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic, 19 Aug. 2021
  • Nobody says surfing the web anymore, but at the time the phrase made sense as a description of the lugubrious, often frustrating task of finding entertainment.
    — Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 25 Mar. 2024
  • No doubt alert to the lugubrious potential of his material, Di Benedetto is more than usually matter-of-fact.
    — Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker, 23 Jan. 2017
  • The road is completely blocked by angry protestors, and their lugubrious chants and slogans become a nerve-wracking soundtrack to everything that follows.
    — Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter, 30 Sep. 2019
  • The film is a mess of tones and ideas, lugubrious splatter-movie violence mixed with a confused desire to appeal to the Stranger Things demographic.
    — Declan Gallagher, EW.com, 20 Oct. 2022
  • The same critique can be levelled at most of the rest of the cycle, with the notable exception of the Fourth Symphony, which makes a virtue of lugubrious stasis.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2022
  • The new film focuses on tracks from the subsequent albums Ghosteen and Carnage, and despite those lugubrious titles, the work evokes as much hope as darkness.
    — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 12 Feb. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lugubrious.' 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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