somber
Their happiness was tinged with somberness.
His mood changed suddenly, the somberness vanishing as if it had never been there.
The somberness of the church was relieved only by the wall-paintings.

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:

Darkness & becoming dark
The qualities of colour

Examples of somberness

somberness
I try to go from somberness to excitement.
From Huffington Post
Her style, so effective in bestowing layers of somberness and irony on explosive family scenes, serves her well whenever there is great suffering to be depicted.
From NPR
There was a suggestion of somberness in her eyes as she looked down at him.
From Project Gutenberg
She was not discontented, save at the enforced somberness of their lives.
From Project Gutenberg
The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours.
From Project Gutenberg
In the plushy black somberness of her eyes a highlight glinted suddenly.
From Project Gutenberg
The somberness of her thoughts affected her surroundings very much as rain affects the atmosphere.
From Project Gutenberg
His demanding survey of her was disconcerting, but his somberness was that of disappointment rather than of any distrust.
From Project Gutenberg
But all this somberness of nature brought comfort and lightness of heart to the besieged.
From Project Gutenberg
It was as if the somberness of those wind-swept woods had crept into his cabin.
From Project Gutenberg
In this white and lilac are permitted to relieve the somberness of the attire.
From Project Gutenberg
Her pale face was very lovely in the brilliant morning light, though the somberness of her wide, gray eyes was deepened.
From Project Gutenberg
The handsomeness was marred by a somberness, a sternness of demeanor.
From Project Gutenberg
Life might easily come to be sober to somberness, which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable.
From Project Gutenberg
Slowly and overpoweringly objects became plain in the somberness of his surroundings.
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.