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say it: DOW-ur
dour is an adjective meaning "stubbornly unyielding". It is pronounced /ˈdaʊɚ/ — DOW-ur. It carries 3 recorded senses.
stubbornly unyielding
“dogged persistence”
“dour determination”
“the most vocal and pertinacious of all the critics”
“a mind not gifted to discover truth but tenacious to hold it”
“men tenacious of opinion”
harshly uninviting or formidable in manner or appearance
“a dour, self-sacrificing life”
“a forbidding scowl”
“a grim man loving duty more than humanity”
“undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw”
showing a brooding ill humor
“a dark scowl”
“the proverbially dour New England Puritan”
“a glum, hopeless shrug”
“he sat in moody silence”
“a morose and unsociable manner”
“a saturnine, almost misanthropic young genius”
“a sour temper”
“a sullen crowd”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for dour come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.