WordWeb Online

1. Offering little or no hope
   "prospects were bleak"; "Life in the Aran Islands has always been bleak and difficult";
   - black, dim
    
2. Providing no shelter or sustenance
   "the bleak treeless regions of the high Andes";
   - bare, barren, desolate, stark
    
3. Unpleasantly cold and damp
   "bleak winds of the North Atlantic";
   - cutting, raw

1. A small European river fish

Derived forms: bleakest, bleaker, bleaks

See also: cold, hopeless, inhospitable

Encyclopedia: Bleak, Virginia