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The quality of being dreary — that grey, flat, going-nowhere feeling a place or a stretch of time can have. It is the noun form, so it names the feeling itself rather than describing something: the dreariness of a February afternoon, the dreariness of the work. Two things live in it at once, and both matter: the thing is dull, and the dullness presses down on you and makes you low. Plain doesn't reach that far — passes when something happens, while dreariness feels like a weather system you're stuck inside. That's why it goes so naturally with rain, winter, grey buildings, waiting rooms, and jobs where every day repeats. It is uncountable, so 'the dreariness' or just 'dreariness', never 'a dreariness' or 'drearinesses'. It's a written word more than a spoken one; in speech people say 'how depressing this place is'.
沉悶、陰鬱、了無生氣（那種又無聊又讓人心情低落的感覺）
組成dreary + -ness. The ending -ness turns an adjective into the name of its quality — kind → kindness, dark → darkness. The y softens to i before it, as usual. The root goes back to Old English drēoriġ, which meant sad, and further back to a Germanic word meaning bloody or gory — the word has travelled a long way from blood, through grief, to a wet Tuesday.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
drearinessnoun
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The characteristic of being dreary.
- What tho’ the moon—the white moon Shed all the splendour of her noon, Her smile is chilly—and her beam, In that time of dreariness, will seem (So like you gather in your breath) A portrait taken after death.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。