Darkling
adj, adv, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Darkness. rare, uncountable
"She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling. "They'll think we've gone mooning," she said, jerking her head at the household. "I wonder what they make of us – criminals.""
- 2 A child of darkness; someone dark by nature or who has grown dark in character. obsolete
- 3 A creature that lives in the dark.
- 4 A demon. poetic
- 1 present participle and gerund of darkle form-of, gerund, participle, present
- 1 Dark; growing dark; darkening. not-comparable, poetic
"She still pursued its flight, with all the speed / Her fainting strength had hitherto supplied: / What pathless wilds she crossed ! What forests darkling wide !"
- 2 Obscure; taking place unseen, as if in the dark. figuratively, not-comparable
- 1 (poetic) occurring in the dark or night wordnet
- 2 uncannily or threateningly dark or obscure wordnet
- 1 In the dark; in obscurity. not-comparable
"So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky."
Etymology
From Middle English derkelyng. By surface analysis, dark + -ling.
Coined by Irish poet Mary Tighe in 1805, likely as an extension of the adverbial sense, and popularized by John Keats.
From darkle + -ing, darkle itself a backformation from Tighe's adjectival sense.
From dark + -ling.
More for "darkling"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.