FreeScrabbleDictionary

bleak

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
11
Words With Friends
13
Letters
5
Pronunciation
/bliːk/

Definition of bleak

4 senses · 2 parts of speech · etymology included

adj

  1. Without color; pale; pallid.
    “When she came out she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead.”
See all 4 definitions

adj

  1. Without color; pale; pallid.
    “When she came out she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead.”
  2. Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds.
    “a bleak and bare rock”
    “a bleak, crater-pocked moonscape”
    “They escaped across the bleak landscape.”
    “We hiked across open meadows and climbed bleak mountains.”
    “Wastes too bleak to rear / The common growth of earth, the foodful ear.”
  3. Unhappy; cheerless; miserable; emotionally desolate.
    “Downtown Albany felt bleak that February after the divorce.”
    “A bleak future is in store for you.”
    “The news is bleak.”
    “The survey paints a bleak picture.”
    “But the bleakest Utopia of all, the very first of the Unutopias, had come from Wells long before that.”

noun

  1. A small European river fish (Alburnus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae.

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

From Middle English bleke (also bleche, whence the English doublet bleach (“pale, bleak”)), and bleike (due to Old Norse), and earlier Middle English blak, blac (“pale, wan”), from Old English…

See full etymology

From Middle English bleke (also bleche, whence the English doublet bleach (“pale, bleak”)), and bleike (due to Old Norse), and earlier Middle English blak, blac (“pale, wan”), from Old English blǣc, blǣċ, blāc (“bleak, pale, pallid”) and Old Norse bleikr (“pale, whitish”), all from Proto-Germanic *blaikaz (“pale, shining”). Cognate with Dutch bleek (“pale, wan, pallid”), Low German blek (“pale”), German bleich (“pale, wan, sallow”), Danish bleg (“pale”), Swedish blek (“pale, pallid”), Norwegian Bokmål bleik, blek (“pale”), Norwegian Nynorsk bleik (“pale”), Faroese bleikur (“pale”), Icelandic bleikur (“pale, pink”).

Anagrams of bleak

5 plays · some not in Scrabble

Words you can make from bleak

30 playable · top: BAKE (10 pts)

Best play bake 10 points

4-letter words

9 words

3-letter words

12 words

2-letter words

8 words

Hooks

1 extension · 1 back

A single letter you can add to bleak to make another valid word.

Back

Find your best play with bleak

See every word you can make from a set of letters that includes bleak, or browse word lists you can mine for high-scoring plays.

Find more plays Browse word lists