Gloomy means dark and low in spirits, and it does both jobs at once. A November afternoon at four o'clock, a hallway with one bulb out, a man staring into his tea and saying nothing.
Rooms and weather are gloomy; so are people, faces and voices. The third use is about what is coming — a gloomy forecast, gloomy figures, a gloomy outlook all mean bad news is expected. The noun is gloom, which is both the half-dark of a room and the mood inside it, and it lives in the phrase 'doom and gloom'. Gloomy is slower and heavier than sad: it settles on a place rather than striking a person.
1adjectivegloomyDark and short of light.~33%
“The kitchen was gloomy even at midday.”
2adjectivemiserableSad and without hope.~50%
“He has been gloomy since the results came out.”
synonyms: miserable, downcast
3adjectiveexpectingExpecting bad things to happen.~17%
“The report paints a gloomy picture of next year.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Gloomy is gloom with -y on the end. Its relative in Saterland Frisian, glumig, carries the same pair of meanings — dark, and low in spirits — so the light and the mood have travelled together in more than one language.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰley- — to gleam, shimmer, glow
Proto-Germanic
*glōmaz — gleam, shimmer, sheen
Proto-West Germanic
*glōm
Old English
glōm — gloaming, twilight, darkness
Middle English
*gloom
English
gloom
English, today
gloomy
From gloom + -y. Cognate with stq glumig (“dark, gloomy”). gloom comes from Middle English gloom, glom, from Old English glōm (“gloaming, twilight, darkness”), from Proto-West Germanic glōm, from Proto-Germanic glōmaz (“gleam, shimmer, sheen”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰley- (“to gleam, shimmer, glow”). The English word is cognate with Norwegian glom (“transparent membrane”), Scots gloam (“twilight; faint light; dull gleam”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA