Dreary means dull, grey and joyless. A dreary morning, dreary work, dreary weather.
It carries a flatness that boring does not: dreary suggests grey light and low spirits together, which is why it attaches so readily to weather and to February. Dreary work is monotonous rather than difficult. Note dreariness; and that the word once meant bloody — Old English dreorig — and travelled from gore through sorrow to drizzle, which is one of the longest slides in the language.
1adjectivedrearyDull, grey and joyless.
“It was a dreary November afternoon, grey and wet, with nothing to do.”
dreary is a quality of dullness.
Also accepted in games: gloomy, bleak
Old English dreorig meant bloody or gory, from a Germanic root about blood. It softened to sorrowful in Middle English and to merely dull much later, so a dreary afternoon is the far end of a very dark word.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰrews- — to break, break off, crumble
Proto-Germanic
*dreuzagaz — bloody
Proto-West Germanic
*dreuʀag
Old English
drēoriġ — sad
Middle English
drery
English, today
dreary
From Middle English drery, from Old English drēoriġ (“sad”), from Proto-West Germanic dreuʀag, from Proto-Germanic dreuzagaz (“bloody”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰrews- (“to break, break off, crumble”), equivalent to drear + -y. Cognate with stq trurich (“sad, dreary”), West Frisian treurich (“sad, dreary”), Dutch treurig (“sad, gloomy”), Low German trurig (“sad”), German traurig (“sad, sorrowful, mournful”), Old Norse dreyrugr, dreyrigr (“bloody, gory”), whence Icelandic dreyrugur (“bloody”). Related to Old English drēor (“blood, falling blood”), Old English drysmian (“to become gloomy”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA