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''tenebrous'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260915190735-00-⌔

tenebrous - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

tenebrous (comparative more tenebrous, superlative most tenebrous)

  • (literary, also figurative) Dark and gloomy; obscure. [from 15th c.]
    • ✤ Synonyms: see Thesaurus: dark
    • ✤ Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress
      Met in a dusky arch, […]      1
    • ✤ […] and it is inevitable that her murdered spirit become a denizen of Jerusalem’s tenebrous woods.2
    • ✤ White was more delicate, more feminine, more beautiful. Dark was more robust, more masculine, more tenebrous.3
    • ✤ 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.”4

Etymology

🖼️ ➺

From Middle English tenebrose, from Anglo-Norman tenebrous (earlier tenebrus), from Latin tenebrōsus, itself from tenebrae (“darkness, shadows”).5

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈtɛn.ɪ.bɹəs/, /ˈtɛn.ə.bɹəs/
    • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American) IPA: /ˈtɛn.ə.bɹəs/
  • Hyphenation: ten‧e‧brous

Printed 2026-09-15.

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Footnotes

  1. 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: ↩

  2. 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: ↩

  3. 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: ↩

  4. 2008, Kazuo Ishiguro, “Introduction”, in Brian W. Shaffer, Cynthia F. Wong, editors, Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, page xi: ↩

  5. “tenebrous”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩