tenebrous

comparative more tenebrous · superlative most tenebrous · alternative tenebrious

1. alsofigurativelyliteraryDark and gloomy; obscure.First known use 15th c.

   Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress Met in a dusky arch,[…]

   1847 November 1, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, chapter II, in Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, Boston, Mass.: William D. Ticknor & Company, →OCLC, part II, page 94

   3 more examples

   […]and it is inevitable that her murdered spirit become a denizen of Jerusalem's tenebrous woods.

   1992, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Troia Vittrice: Reviving Troy in the Woods of Jerusalem”, in Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 174

   White was more delicate, more feminine, more beautiful. Dark was more robust, more masculine, more tenebrous.

   1993, Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, “Works and Days”, in Natalie Zemon Davis, Arlette Farge, editors, A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 62

   Although Ishiguro’s novels are arguably more overtly concerned with emo- tional and psychological matters than with historical ones, it is certainly no accident that he sets all of his novels, as Margaret Atwood maintains, “against tenebrous historical backdrops.”

   2008, Kazuo Ishiguro, “Introduction”, in Brian W. Shaffer, Cynthia F. Wong, editors, Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, page xi

   Synonyms: adumbral, blear, caliginous, cimmerian, crepuscular, dark, darksome, darkling