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Synonyms
- black
- bleak
- cheerless
- 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
- tenebrific
- tenebrous
- wretched
Examples of sunless in a Sentence
mental patients who were once condemned to spend their lives in the sunless confines of a state asylum
Recent Examples on the Web
The Box had a slighty funhouse mirror quality to it, probably because the set was housed at the Fell’s Point Recreation Pier, a sunless relic of better days in Charm City.
—Paul McGuire, Variety, 14 Dec. 2023
The sunless winter caused extraordinary disorientation; her imagination conjured phantoms from the dark.
—Taymour Soomro Scott Conarroe, New York Times, 10 May 2023
What governs the sunless vistas is not a peaceable kingdom but a fierce contest for life, occasionally made vivid for us by the fiery, bioluminescent nature of its display.
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
Its hangar can hold three miniature submarines for taking humans into the sunless depths.
—William J. Broad, New York Times, 17 Sep. 2020
Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.
—Amos Zeeberg (discover Web Editor), Discover Magazine, 15 July 2010
Unlike the splotchy, bright orange fake tans of the early to mid 2000s, today’s sunless tanning products are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.
—Cristina Montemayor, SELF, 27 May 2022
The camera lights illuminate the sunless landscape in a way that suggests a sci-fi movie.
—John Anderson, WSJ, 12 Oct. 2021
Soon, however, a revolutionary new telescope launching in 2025 may be able unlock the secrets of the darkness of space, where sunless worlds may even outnumber the stars.
—Nola Taylor Redd, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Sep. 2020
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sunless.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
First Known Use
1589, in the meaning defined above
Dictionary Entries Near sunless
Cite this Entry
“Sunless.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sunless. Accessed 10 Jun. 2024.
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