desolate adds an element of utter remoteness or lack of human contact to any already disheartening aspect.
a desolate outpost
Example Sentences
The room was surprisingly bare and cheerless. a dank and cheerless castle that was once the site of unspeakable horrors
Recent Examples on the WebThat turned an entertaining exhibition into an awkward and cheerless faux-competitive affair. Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 19 July 2022 For all his gloom, Mann was not entirely cheerless.Los Angeles Times, 29 July 2021 Lawrence’s was among the last, with a green campus full of trees, but a gray, cheerless interior and food that, in his words, looked regurgitated. Sarah Enelow-snyder, New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020 Bishop spent a cold childhood raised by cheerless Calvinist grandparents (her official guardian, Uncle Jack, was reputedly something of a bully), and quickly learned that intense emotional attachments led to distress. Scott Bradfield, Washington Post, 8 Nov. 2019 Nothing like signifyin’ in the Henry Louis Gates Jr. sense, with its necessarily intelligent playfulness, but something essentially post-literate and cheerless. Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 11 July 2019 But a future predicated on product development alone, with little to offer the human heart, is a cheerless future indeed. Michael J. Lewis, WSJ, 10 Jan. 2019 Just ahead awaits a peculiar Southern California landscape of palm trees and barbed wire, and then a cheerless, pitiless site: Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution. James Andrew Miller, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Feb. 2018 The visit draws a strangely dutiful, cheerless local crowd. Holland Cotter, New York Times, 13 Sep. 2017 See More