Charles Dickens
Did you know?
The Evil History of Dismal
In late antiquity, certain days each month, called “Egyptian days,” were regarded as inauspicious, probably as a relic of ancient Egyptian belief. By the Middle Ages, people took them to be anniversaries of the Biblical plagues in Egypt. There were 24 such days per year, and in Anglo-French they were called collectively dismal (from Latin dies mali, “evil days”), and this word was borrowed into Middle English. In time the “evil days” sense was forgotten and dismal was simply taken to mean “disastrous.” The noun dismal, meaning “swamp,” goes back to the 1700s when the marshy region in Virginia and North Carolina was named the Great Dismal Swamp.
Examples of dismal in a Sentence
Mac Cerullo, Boston Herald, 25 May 2025
Amrum Amrum Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin has made great films (the 2004 rock’n’roll redemption parable Head-On) and dismal ones (the grim serial-killer creepout The Golden Glove, from 2019).
—Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 23 May 2025
Manchester United’s 1-0 defeat against Tottenham Hotspur in the Europa League final was a crushing end to a truly dismal season.
—Talk Of The Devils, New York Times, 22 May 2025
When Biden was first elected to the Senate, at twenty-nine, life expectancy for men with metastatic prostate cancer was dismal.
—Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 22 May 2025
See All Example Sentences for dismal
Cite this Entry
“Dismal.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dismal. Accessed 5 Jun. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
Middle English dismal "days marked on a calendar as unlucky," from early French (same meaning), from Latin dies mali, "evil days"
Share