drab

Unless you’re Steven Spielberg, with enough money and success to have final-cut privilege, everything in a franchise blockbuster is bound to look flat, feel drab, and be nauseatingly overexplained.

From Salon ● Aug. 20, 2026

The milestone, made possible by billions in private and government funding, was on display in the middle of the Idaho desert, where a cluster of drab hangars might otherwise go unnoticed.

From Barron's ● Jun. 28, 2026

England remain in control of their destiny - but this was a drab encounter that brought them back down to earth with a bump.

From BBC ● Jun. 24, 2026

With sad brown eyes, he offered drab, wordy pronouncements in a gentle voice.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 2026

The varnish around the drab began to bubble and char in a black ring around the piece of iron.

From "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss

Drifting down a corridor at her German school, a world that looks even drabber and uglier after the wonders she’s seen, this Priscilla seems lost in a dream, the most private of reveries.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 27, 2023

Unfortunately, the visuals suffer from many scratches and dirt specks popping up on the screen, and the second film has too much soft focus and a much drabber color palette.

From Washington Times ● Apr. 30, 2022

Take away one of those elements, and the scene gets a little drabber.

From Slate ● Sep. 4, 2020

The dapper Huston interrupted a white-hot career streak — and an affair with Olivia de Havilland — for olive drab and an even drabber first assignment in the Aleutian Islands.

From New York Times ● Mar. 2, 2014

One François Villon, scholar, poet, drinker, sworder, drabber, blabber, good at pen, point, and pitcher.

From If I Were King by Justin McCarthy

To which Forest fan Pete Bancroft replied: "I'll take the drabbest 1-0 win you've ever seen."

From BBC ● May 8, 2023

According to weather data analyzed by The Times, it really has been the drabbest winter Southern Californians have lived through recently.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 31, 2023

There were always one or two elements that did catch my eye, though, even in the drabbest productions.

From New York Times ● May 18, 2022

A new study has found that botanists' research inexorably skews toward showy plants, whereas the drabbest, dullest and shortest are often left behind—even if they are endangered.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 30, 2021

Twilight was falling, there was a slight drizzle of rain and I told myself that I had stumbled on the drabbest bit of all London.

From Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, March 12, 1919 by Various

Our forefathers occasionally drabbed baulor, some of our people may still do such a thing, but only from compulsion.’

From The Romany Rye A Sequel to 'Lavengro' by John Sampson

But, as a rule, the pirate ruffled and bullied and drabbed without let or hindrance, until it was time for him to go back to his ship once more.

From The Green Flag by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“That’s his way, child, to-day a tinker, to-morrow something else; and as for being drabbed, I don’t know what to say about it.” p.

From Lavengro The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest by William Knapp

Our forefathers occasionally drabbed baulor; some of our people may still do such a thing, but only from compulsion.”

From The Romany Rye by George Henry Borrow

The day I went through, the interminable, oblique, thin rain took the gold out of the wheat and the brown from the distant fields and bushes, and drabbed all the colours in the grass.

From Letters from America by Rupert Brooke

“Why, you have had a banquet of pork, and after the banquet, Mrs. Chikno sang a song about drabbing baulor, so I naturally thought you might have lately been engaged in such a thing.”

From The Romany Rye by George Henry Borrow

‘Why, you have had a banquet of pork, and after the banquet Mrs. Chikno sang a song about drabbing baulor, so I naturally thought you might have lately been engaged in such a thing.’

From The Romany Rye A Sequel to 'Lavengro' by John Sampson