darkness

Etymology

It is formed from English dark + -ness.^[2][3][4] The Old English form was deorcnysse, from deorc (“dark”) and the suffix -nysse, and it became derknesse in Middle English.^[5][6][4][7] Dark itself goes back to Proto-Germanic *derkaz, of uncertain further origin.^[4] Old English also had other words for darkness: Etymonline notes that a 10th-century treatise on astronomy uses Old English þeostrum.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Lack of moral or spiritual goodness, wickedness: the OED's earliest quotation is from Old English glosses on Isidore's Sententiae.^[2] Etymonline gives the Old English word the sense "absence of light", which the 1989 edition of the OED dated before 1050,^[4][8] while the revised OED's first example of the physical sense is from a psalter of about 1350.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The word moved easily between the physical and the moral: Etymonline dates the figurative sense "sinfulness, wickedness" to the early 14th century,^[4] and the OED finds it already in Old English.^[2] The historical thesaurus shows darkness used for secrecy and concealment from Old English, for lack of knowledge from the early 13th century and in the language of faith from the early 14th.^[9] The Wycliffite Bible of the 1380s used it for night, for blindness, for gloom and despair, and for obscurity or secrecy.^[2][4] Chaucer has derknesse 32 times, for darkness, obscurity, ignorance and evil.^[10] Ignorance, the lack of spiritual or intellectual light, appears in Chaucer's Boece, and death from 1535, in the Coverdale Bible.^[2][3] Johnson (1755) gave "absence of light" first, then "opakeness" and "obscurity".^[11] The latest sense is phonetic, the "dark" quality of a velarized sound (1906).^[2]

Timeline

• Old English – deorcnysse, wickedness, evil.^[2]
• before 1050 – absence of light.^[8][6]
• before 1382 – night; blindness; gloom, despair.^[2]
• c. 1384 – obscurity, mystery, secrecy.^[2][4]
• before 1398 – depth of shade or colour.^[2]
• c. 1425 – ignorance, lack of spiritual or intellectual light.^[2]
• c. 1450 – obscurity of meaning (obsolete by 1923).^[2]
• 1535 – death.^[2][3]
• 1906 – in phonetics, velarized quality.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. The partial or total absence of light: the darkness of the cellar.^[5][2][3]
2. Night or nightfall: They reached camp before darkness fell.^[2]
3. The quality of being dark in shade or colour.^[5][2]
4. Wickedness or evil, as in the Prince of Darkness, the devil.^[2][3]
5. Lack of spiritual or intellectual enlightenment; ignorance.^[5][2][3]
6. Gloom, unhappiness or despair.^[2]
7. Secrecy or obscurity: kept in darkness about the plan.^[2][4]
8. (literary) Blindness.^[2][4]
9. Death.^[2][3]
10. (phonetics) The velarized quality of a sound, as of a dark l.^[2]

Word family

• predarkness
• semidarkness

Related words

• dark
• darken

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
7. ^ Bosworth, Joseph; Toller, T. Northcote (1898), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Toller, T. Northcote (1921), Supplement
8. ^ a b Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus, University of Glasgow, mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk
10. ^ Benson, Larry D., Glossarial Concordance to Middle English (Chaucer, Gower), Johns Hopkins University, github.com/jhu-digital-manuscripts/gcme
11. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.