It comes from monotone, so it was originally (in the eighteenth century) used exclusively for sounds, speech, or music. So UNINTERESTING is a fairly straightforward (and self-explanatory) antonym for interesting, as is UNEXCITING or UNAMUSING.Īnd thinking of day-to-day boredom, MONOTONOUS can describe both a dull and repetitive existence and speech of writing which is uninspired and uninspiring. If something is dull or tedious, it might also be described as TIRESOME or WEARISOME: that is, something which tires because it fails to inspire our interest. The OED’s first recorded use of this sense of ‘dull’ is from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, where Adriana asks, ‘Are my discourses dull?’ The word is believed to be from an Old English word meaning ‘foolish’, derived from the German toll. The word is from the Latin meaning ‘to weary’.ĭULL, another common synonym for boring, initially meant someone or something slow, sluggish, and uninspired from that initial meaning came its commoner use, denoting something that causes ennui, something uninteresting or uninspired.
This word has been in use since at least the early fifteenth century (the OED’s earliest citation is from the poet John Lydgate, the great follower of Chaucer), and its meaning has remained fairly consistent ever since: it denotes something that is overly long and tiresome – or, if you will, boring. Go to the thesaurus article about these synonyms and antonyms of spend. And it’s surprisingly modern, only first turning up in English in the 1830s, it seems.
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