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dull

AdjektivVerbSubstantivVerbhäufig in Dialogen

  • Vereinigte Staaten//dʌl//
  • Irland//dʌl//
  • Irland//dul//
  • //dʊl//

Lacking the ability to cut easily; not sharp.

Adjektiv

  1. 1

    Lacking the ability to cut easily; not sharp.

    All these knives are dull.

  2. 2

    Boring; not exciting or interesting.

    He sat through the dull lecture and barely stayed awake.

    "You are very dull this morning, Sheriff," said the youngest daughter of the house, who, being the baby and pretty, had grown pettishly privileged in speech.

    But there we were given only the dullest, driest, pemmicanised forms like The Student's Hume, Once I had a hundred pages of The Student's Hume as a holiday task.

  3. 3

    Not shiny; having a matte finish or no particular luster or brightness.

    Choose a dull finish to hide fingerprints.

    a dull fire or lamp; a dull red or yellow; a dull mirror

    A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire.

    The young bird had the plumage of the saddleback, not the even chestnut of the jackbird, although its plumage was rather duller than that of the adult.

  4. 4

    Not bright or intelligent; stupid; having slow understanding.

    She is not bred so dull but she can learn.

    dull at classical learning

    She paused and took a defiant breath. ‘If you don't believe me, I can't help it. But I'm not a liar.’ ¶ ‘No,’ said Luke, grinning at her. ‘You're not dull enough! […] What about the kid's clothes? I don't suppose they were anything to write home about, but didn't you keep anything? A bootee or a bit of embroidery or anything at all?’

  5. 5

    Sluggish, listless.

    This people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing.

    O, help my weak wit and sharpen my dull tongue.

    […] St. Bede's at this period of its history was perhaps the poorest and most miserable parish in the East End of London. Close-packed, crushed by the buttressed height of the railway viaduct, rendered airless by huge walls of factories, it at once banished lively interest from a stranger's mind and left only a dull oppression of the spirit.

  6. 6

    Bored, depressed, down.

    I felt dull all day.

  7. 7

    Cloudy, overcast.

    It's a dull day.

  8. 8

    Insensible; unfeeling.

    Think me not / So dull a devil to forget the loss / Of such a matchless wife.

  9. 9

    Heavy; lifeless; inert.

    the dull earth

    c. 1857', Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Table-Talk As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so changes of study a dull brain.

  10. 10

    Not intense; felt indistinctly or only slightly.

    Pressing on the bruise produces a dull pain.

  11. 11

    Not clear, muffled. (of a noise or sound)

Herkunft

From Middle English dull, dul (also dyll, dill, dwal), from Old English dol (“dull, foolish, erring, heretical; foolish, silly; presumptuous”), from Proto-West Germanic *dol, from Proto-Germanic *dulaz, from earlier *dwulaz, a variant of *dwalaz (“stunned, mad, foolish, misled”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰwel-, *dʰewel- (“to dim, dull, cloud, make obscure, swirl, whirl”). Cognate with Scots dull, doll (“slow to understand or hear, deaf, dull”), North Frisian dol (“rash, unthinking, giddy, flippant”), Dutch dol (“crazy, mad, insane”), Low German dul, dol (“mad, silly, stupid, fatuous”), German toll (“crazy, mad, wild, fantastic”), Danish dval (“foolish, absurd”), Icelandic dulur (“secretive, silent”), West-Flemish dul (angry, furious).

Verb

  1. 1

    To render dull; to remove or blunt an edge or something that was sharp.

    Years of misuse have dulled the tools.

    This […] dulled their swords.

  2. 2

    To soften, moderate or blunt; to make dull, stupid, or sluggish; to stupefy.

    He drinks to dull the pain.

    Those [drugs] she has / Will stupefy and dull the sense a while.

    Use and custom have so dulled our eyes.

  3. 3

    To lose a sharp edge; to become dull.

    A razor will dull with use.

  4. 4

    To render dim or obscure; to sully; to tarnish.

Substantiv

  1. 1

    altertümlichA noose of string, metal wire, or hair used to snare an animal, especially a fish.

    Play fair, boys. No dynamite nor "dulling." The deadly "dull," or wire noose, is a fatal weapon against a trout.

Herkunft

Probably from Irish dul, dol (“loop, noose, snare”).

Verb

  1. 1

    altertümlichTo fish (or snare an animal, especially a fish) with such a noose.

    I hope that the barbarous practice called dulling has gone out of fashion.

    Play fair, boys. No dynamite nor "dulling." The deadly "dull," or wire noose, is a fatal weapon against a trout.

    In Irish-English, “dulling for trout” is well known,—the fish as they lie still in a pool are snared with a noose of horsehair.

Formen

Plural
dulls
Komparativ
duller
Superlativ
dullest
Präteritum
dulled
Partizip II
dulled
Partizip I
dulling
3. Person Singular
dulls
Die NachbarseitenDie alphabetische Reihenfolge folgt den Regeln der Sprache, nicht den Bytewerten: Ein Akzent entscheidet nur zwischen zwei sonst gleichen Wörtern, und das Spanische führt Ñ als eigenen Buchstaben.

Lexikalische Inhalte aus dem Wiktionary, unter CC BY-SA 4.0 · Quelleintrag · Datenstand 2026-08-23

Rang unter den Wörtern des OpenSubtitles-2018-Korpus — Untertitel aus Film und Fernsehen, also gesprochene und nicht geschriebene Sprache (CC BY-SA 3.0).