How to Use bleary in a Sentence

bleary

adjective
  • She looked at me with bleary eyes.
  • Late at night, the bleary-eyed teams share their ideas.
    Rowan Jacobsen, Outside Online, 8 Aug. 2019
  • Looking on were a small cadre of bleary-eyed staffers and floor staff.
    Ryan Nobles, Ted Barrett and Manu Raju, CNN, 28 May 2021
  • The next day, Bharara addressed the bleary-eyed staff of the Southern District.
    Andrew Rice, Daily Intelligencer, 3 Oct. 2017
  • The kids filed in right at game time, bleary-eyed but excited.
    Nick Hoppe, SFChronicle.com, 2 July 2018
  • She and the actor John Krasinski read the names to a crowd of bleary-eyed reporters.
    Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2017
  • Though tired and bleary-eyed, Jack made it to Rebecca’s show.
    The Washington Post, The Mercury News, 15 Mar. 2017
  • On the eighth floor of the Strand, the two sauna ladies look bleary-eyed, but tickled, in their white gowns and hospital shoes.
    Dean Kuipers, SPIN, 8 Jan. 2023
  • Dutcher gave a brief speech to his bleary-eyed players and motioned to the net on one of the baskets.
    Mark Zeigler, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Mar. 2021
  • In the picture, Gomez stares bleary-eyed into the camera, wrapped in a blanket.
    Neha Prakash, Allure, 9 Oct. 2019
  • One boy wiped the bleary eyes of his baby sibling, just woken up from a nap.
    Aurora Almendral, New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020
  • For a week and a half, baseball was at the center of the sports world, the subject of every morning’s bleary-eyed talk.
    Robert O'Connell, The Atlantic, 2 Nov. 2017
  • Her eyes were bleary, and her cigarette held on to her lip like a magic trick.
    Washington Post, 8 Nov. 2021
  • And maybe soon, the guy who makes your Triple Layer Nachos some bleary midnight.
    Sophie Alexander, Bloomberg.com, 12 May 2020
  • In the predawn darkness, Morales, 28, gets her girls ready for school, walking them, bleary eyed, to breakfast in the lobby.
    Vinny Vella, Courant Community, 22 Dec. 2017
  • Over nine hours, bleary-eyed councilors heard a message that had rippled across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
    NBC News, 19 Dec. 2021
  • After the game, Redick wore the disappointment — his eyes bleary, a Dodgers cap pulled down over part of his face.
    Dan Woike, latimes.com, 30 Apr. 2017
  • Any bleary eyes from the night before were gone as this collection kicked like a strong shot of caffeine.
    Alice Tate, Marie Claire, 20 Feb. 2013
  • Whether any of them will pass muster with bleary-eyed Grammy voters is anyone’s guess.
    Jon Burlingame, Variety, 20 Oct. 2022
  • His eyes are bleary; a blurred clock raises its hands toward midnight.
    Brendan Fitzgerald, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
  • Notre Dame wasn’t the only bleary-eyed arrival to San Diego early Thursday.
    Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17 Mar. 2022
  • Silver hair tousled, dark eyes bleary, Tosh grabs her phone from the nightstand, taps off the soft music and starts scrolling through her texts and emails.
    Andrea Ball, USA TODAY, 27 Feb. 2022
  • Sun or not, bleary-eyed race winner Alex Bowman needed his shades.
    Dan Gelston, Orlando Sentinel, 30 Apr. 2022
  • For the rest of us, technology can help overcome that bleary-eyed and dreamy-headed feeling to get us out of bed on time.
    David Nield, Popular Science, 25 Sep. 2019
  • Crying is par for the course with the Ohioan, who was often seen bleary-eyed during his tenure as a congressman.
    Sarah Brookbank, Cincinnati.com, 20 Nov. 2019
  • Four years ago, the bulk of this year’s Westview boy’s soccer roster arrived as one, 14 bleary-eyed freshmen.
    Shane Hoffmann, oregonlive, 12 Nov. 2022
  • At a bleary 8:30 the next morning, one of Google’s top researchers gave a keynote with a sobering message about AI’s future.
    Tom Simonite, Wired, 13 Dec. 2019
  • The benefit of an extra hour of sleep becomes more valuable than an extra hour of (bleary-eyed) work.
    Adam H. Beasley, miamiherald, 30 Aug. 2017
  • The best Weeknd songs are expeditions into the bleary morality of the middle of the night, a conflict between wise inklings and disastrous impulses.
    Vulture, 30 June 2023
  • Two days before The Times visited, the 79th brigade had suffered heavy losses, the toll of unrelenting combat evident in their bleary and bloodshot eyes.
    Tyler Hicks Marc Santora, New York Times, 5 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bleary.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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