Drear means dismal and gloomy. A drear November, drear and cold, the drear light.
It is a poetic shortening of dreary and belongs to verse and to deliberate archaism — prose says dreary. Both go back to an Old English word meaning bloody or grievous, which is a much darker start than the flat greyness the word now names.
1adjectivedrearDismal and gloomy.
“The winter moor was bleak and drear under a low grey sky.”
drear is a quality of gloom.
A shortening of dreary, from Old English dreorig, meaning bloody or sorrowful, from dreor, blood.
Shortening of dreary.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA