cheerless

adjective

cheer·​less ˈchir-ləs 

: lacking qualities that cheer : bleak, joyless

a cheerless room

cheerlessly adverb

cheerlessness noun

Synonyms

• black
• bleak
• chill
• Cimmerian
• cloudy
• cold
• comfortless
• dark
• darkening
• depressing
• depressive
• desolate
• dire
• disconsolate
• dismal
• drear
• dreary
• dreich [chiefly Scottish]
• elegiac
• elegiacal
• forlorn
• funereal
• gloomy
• glum
• godforsaken
• gray
• grey
• lonely
• lonesome
• lugubrious
• miserable
• morbid
• morose
• murky
• plutonian
• saturnine
• sepulchral
• solemn
• somber
• sombre
• sullen
• sunless
• tenebrific
• tenebrous
• wretched

Choose the Right Synonym for cheerless

dismal, dreary, bleak, gloomy, cheerless, desolate mean devoid of cheer or comfort.

dismal indicates extreme and utterly depressing gloominess.

dismal weather

dreary, often interchangeable with dismal, emphasizes discouragement resulting from sustained dullness or futility.

a dreary job

bleak suggests chill, dull, and barren characteristics that utterly dishearten.

the bleak years of the depression

gloomy often suggests lack of hope or promise.

gloomy war news

cheerless stresses absence of anything cheering.

a drab and cheerless office

desolate adds an element of utter remoteness or lack of human contact to any already disheartening aspect.

a desolate outpost

Examples of cheerless in a Sentence

The room was surprisingly bare and cheerless.

a dank and cheerless castle that was once the site of unspeakable horrors

Recent Examples on the Web

Gomez gestured across the street toward 100 Centre Street—the criminal courthouse, a cheerless Art Deco building the color of cinder blocks. —Sarah Lustbader, The New Yorker, 10 Mar. 2025

Wedged between the cheerless skyscrapers of Third Avenue and an uncharming stretch of Second, just blocks north of the bro bars of Murray Hill, is a row of nine townhouses. —Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 2 Aug. 2024

Election polls may seem cheerless, inscrutable, and wrapped in data and murky terminology. —W. Joseph Campbell, Fortune, 29 Oct. 2024

Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, there wills broken, their intelligences numbed. —Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 5 July 2024

Photo: Gregg Segal One day in 2003, Joseph Schulman faced a half-dozen or so military officers in a cheerless high-rise office outside the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C. —Ariel Bleicher, IEEE Spectrum, 20 Mar. 2013

That turned an entertaining exhibition into an awkward and cheerless faux-competitive affair. —Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 19 July 2022

For all his gloom, Mann was not entirely cheerless. —Los Angeles Times, 29 July 2021

Lawrence’s was among the last, with a green campus full of trees, but a gray, cheerless interior and food that, in his words, looked regurgitated. —Sarah Enelow-Snyder, New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020

Word History

First Known Use

1575, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for cheerless

• fearless
• peerless
• tearless

Kids Definition

cheerless

adjective

cheer·​less ˈchi(ə)r-ləs 

: offering no cheer : gloomy

cheerlessly adverb

cheerlessness noun