somber
The night started somberly with a minute's silence.
They walked somberly to court yesterday at the start of a fresh ordeal.
He is dressed casually, if somberly, in black.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Lacking humour
a laugh a minuteidiom
be no laughing matteridiom
beyond
beyond a jokeidiom
earnestly
earnestness
humourlessly
intense
joke
laugh
poker-faced
soberly
solemnity
sombreness
starchy
straight-facedly
turgid
turgidity
turgidly
ultra-serious

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Black, white & grey
The qualities of colour

Examples of somberly

somberly
The men and women behind this policy did not approach their effort to "produce more revenue" somberly, but lustily.
From The Atlantic
Silence is the code as students somberly walk back to their studies.
From TIME
And despite their heroes' nominal victories, each ends somberly -- the case is closed but the damage is done.
From Los Angeles Times
For the record they left, somberly, after a prolonged silence.
From CNN
Standing around 50-gallon oil drums with fires inside to keep warm, workers reflect somberly, sometimes colorfully, about the exodus of manufacturing and about their homesickness.
From Washington Post
These rules are adjudicated by an on-the-field ethics committee of umpires somberly dressed in black, their contextual analysis a real-time exercise in bridging the divide between theory and play.
She was looking somberly toward the door through which her late companion had made his exit.
From Project Gutenberg
He pulled his long mustache and looked somberly at the flag.
From Project Gutenberg
His long aristocratic face was stern and his eyes glowed somberly.
From Project Gutenberg
The engineer, out of a heap of blankets, spread across some trunks, regarded him somberly.
From Project Gutenberg
He paused and looked somberly at the floor.
From Project Gutenberg
The curtain of anxiety, lifted for breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a pall.
From Project Gutenberg
The two factions eyed each other somberly, sometimes nodding or exchanging greetings, for the time had not yet come to fight.
From Project Gutenberg
They had heard now the story of the broken mains, and somberly, without lament or rebellion, recognized the full extent of the calamity.
From Project Gutenberg
She glanced somberly past the bamboo gatherers to where we saw a gray corner of the study with its pink ivy geranium blossoms atop.
From Project Gutenberg
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.