dingy
Crow Road is a dingily respectable thoroughfare in Glasgow.
The commercial property was decaying, and dingily lit by old strip lights.
Uncle Walter dingily existed on the few hundred pounds that were left.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Darkness & becoming dark
blackness
darken
darkened
darkness
dim
dimly
dimness
dingy
dully
inky
pitchy
plunge someone/something into darkness
semi-darkness
shade
shaded
shadily
shadow
silhouette
silhouetted
twilight

Examples of dingily

dingily
The two upper floors of the building were pierced by dusty blank-staring windows, the top ones dingily curtained.
From Project Gutenberg
It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings of those colors.
From Project Gutenberg
She had saved him from the second-rate, dingy life he had been so dingily ready to accept.
From Project Gutenberg
The front shop was very small, dingily clean and scornfully unmercantile.
From Project Gutenberg
The window curtains had long since yielded their fresh color to the sunshine and hung dingily in the gaslight.
From Project Gutenberg
She drove to a little square too dingily middle class to require a policeman.
From Project Gutenberg
There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke.
From Project Gutenberg
The dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely the change which had taken place.
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.