Bleak

How to spell bleak

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bleak

What does bleak mean?

1. adjectiveBare, cold, and exposed, with little shelter, colour, or sign of life.
2. adjectiveOffering little hope or encouragement; dismal in prospect.

Bleak in a sentence

• The moor looked bleak under the grey winter sky.

• The company's financial outlook was decidedly bleak after the third loss.

• A bleak stretch of coastline ran for miles without a single house.

• Job prospects in the region remained bleak for younger workers.

Where does bleak come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Bleak traces back to a Germanic root meaning 'pale' or 'shining white', surviving in the Old Norse word bleikr and the closely related Old English blāc, both of which described something wan, colourless, or drained of warmth. The same root gave us 'bleach', the act of making something pale, which is a useful memory link for the unexpected -ea- in the middle. In its earliest English use bleak meant pale or pallid, and only later did it drift toward describing landscapes that were bare, windswept, and stripped of life or colour. From those cold, exposed moors and shorelines the word took on its modern figurative weight, so that a bleak outlook now means a gloomy, hopeless one. The word settled firmly into English by the medieval period, and the original idea of 'pale and colourless' still quietly underlies every bleak winter sky.

How the word is built

• bleak (from Old Norse bleikr / Old English blāc, meaning pale or wan), with the -eak spelling shared by words like bleach