Charles Dickens
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The Evil History of Dismal
In late antiquity, certain days each month, called “Egyptian days,” were regarded as inauspicious, probably as a relic of ancient Egyptian belief. By the Middle Ages, people took them to be anniversaries of the Biblical plagues in Egypt. There were 24 such days per year, and in Anglo-French they were called collectively dismal (from Latin dies mali, “evil days”), and this word was borrowed into Middle English. In time the “evil days” sense was forgotten and dismal was simply taken to mean “disastrous.” The noun dismal, meaning “swamp,” goes back to the 1700s when the marshy region in Virginia and North Carolina was named the Great Dismal Swamp.
Synonyms
- black
- bleak
- cheerless
- chill
- Cimmerian
- cloudy
- cold
- comfortless
- dark
- darkening
- depressing
- depressive
- desolate
- dire
- disconsolate
- drear
- dreary
- dreich [chiefly Scottish]
- elegiac
- elegiacal
- forlorn
- funereal
- gloomy
- glum
- godforsaken
- gray
- grey
- lonely
- lonesome
- lugubrious
- miserable
- morbid
- morose
- murky
- plutonian
- saturnine
- sepulchral
- solemn
- somber
- sombre
- sullen
- sunless
- tenebrific
- tenebrous
- wretched
Examples of dismal in a Sentence
John Frank, Axios, 13 Sep. 2024
In March, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed an executive order creating a committee of experts charged with improving the state’s dismal maternal health outcomes and better educating women about their health insurance options.
—Sarah Varney, NPR, 13 Sep. 2024
Indeed, the season started on a dismal note, with the average stock in the Russell 3000 declining by 5.2%, while the S&P 500 turned in its worst weekly performance since March 2023, dropping more than 4.2%.
—John Buckingham, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2024
The rebuke followed a year of dismal results stemming from refinery disruptions, weaker-than-expected oil production in the Permian Basin, and cost overruns and delays at a massive project in Kazakhstan.
—Bloomberg, The Mercury News, 2 Aug. 2024
See all Example Sentences for dismal 
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dismal.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near dismal
Cite this Entry
“Dismal.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dismal. Accessed 18 Sep. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
Middle English dismal "days marked on a calendar as unlucky," from early French (same meaning), from Latin dies mali, "evil days"
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