CHEERLESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does cheerless mean? 

• CHEERLESS (adjective)
  The adjective CHEERLESS has 1 sense:

1. causing sad feelings of gloom and inadequacy

  Familiarity information: CHEERLESS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CHEERLESS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Causing sad feelings of gloom and inadequacy

Synonyms:

cheerless; depressing; uncheerful

Context example:

an uncheerful place

Similar:

blue; dark; dingy; disconsolate; dismal; drab; drear; dreary; gloomy; grim; sorry (causing dejection)

melancholy; somber; sombre (grave or even gloomy in character)

Also:

unhappy (experiencing or marked by or causing sadness or sorrow or discontent)

joyless (not experiencing or inspiring joy)

Attribute:

cheer; cheerfulness; sunniness; sunshine (the quality of being cheerful and dispelling gloom)

Derivation:

cheerlessness (a feeling of dreary or pessimistic sadness)

 Context examples 

Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god's face.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

They each led into an empty room, dusty and cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the other, so thick with dirt that the evening light glimmered dimly through them.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I feared greatly that she might die in the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky and beating wind and roaring seas.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

“A raw rat sounds a most sorry and cheerless dish.”

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

She could scarcely imagine a more cheerless situation in itself than Mrs Smith's.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

Therefore I resolved to keep myself as much out of their way as I could; and many a wintry hour did I hear the church clock strike, when I was sitting in my cheerless bedroom, wrapped in my little great-coat, poring over a book.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

When he was here before, we made the best of it; but there was a good deal of wet, damp, cheerless weather; there always is in February, you know, and we could not do half that we intended.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

I cannot remember the time when I did not love Eliza; and my affection for her, as we grew up, was such, as perhaps, judging from my present forlorn and cheerless gravity, you might think me incapable of having ever felt.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

A very chill and vault-like air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude; and I was glad, when finally ushered into my chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in ordinary, modern style.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

So I went down to Quincey and took him into the breakfast-room, where the blinds were not drawn down, and which was a little more cheerful, or rather less cheerless, than the other rooms.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)