Skip to content
Allin

dusk

adjectivenounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//dʌsk//
  • //dʊsk//

Tending to darkness or blackness; moderately dark or black; dusky.

adjective

  1. 1

    Tending to darkness or blackness; moderately dark or black; dusky.

    A pathless desert, dusk with horrid shades.

Etymology

From Middle English dosk, dusk(e) (“dusky”, adj.), from Old English dox (“dark, swarthy”), from Proto-Germanic *duskaz (“dark, smoky”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰwes-, related to *dʰewh₂- (“smoke, mist, haze”). Cognate to Latin fuscus (“dark, dusky”), Sanskrit धूसर (dhūsara, “dust-colored”), Old Irish donn (“dark”). Related to dye, dust and dun (see these for more). Doublet of fuscous.

noun

  1. 1

    The time after the sun has set but when the sky is still lit by sunlight; the evening twilight period.

    Witnessing the dusk gives a feeling of solace.

    We caught a beautiful view of the dusk.

  2. 2

    A darkish colour.

    Whose dusk set off the whiteness of the skin.

  3. 3

    The condition of being dusky; duskiness

verb

  1. 1

    To begin to lose light or whiteness; to grow dusk.

    I see the air benighted And all the dusking dales, And lamps in England lighted,

  2. 2

    To make dusk.

    After the sun is up, that shadow which dusketh the light of the Moone must needs be under the earth.

Etymology

From Middle English dusken, from Old English doxian.

Forms

plural
dusks
comparative
dusker
superlative
duskest
past tense
dusked
past participle
dusked
present participle
dusking
third person singular
dusks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).