Drab means dull and colourless. A drab room, drab weather, drab and grey.
It is a criticism of appearance rather than of quality: a drab building is not badly made, it is joyless to look at. It suits weather, uniforms and post-war photographs. Olive drab is a specific military colour and the phrase everybody knows. Note that drab was first the name of an undyed cloth, so the word began as a fabric and became a mood.
1adjectivedrabDull and colourless.
“The office was drab, with grey walls, grey carpets and no windows.”
synonyms: dreary, colourless
drab is a quality of dullness.
Old French drap means cloth, and drab named an undyed woollen cloth of a dull brownish colour. The colour named the cloth and the cloth named the mood.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰrebʰ-
Old French
drap — cloth
English, today
drab
Probably from Middle French - and Old French drap (“cloth”), either:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA