Gloaming
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Twilight, as at early morning (dawn) or (especially) early evening; dusk.
"Where in purple hue, the hieland hills we view / And the moon coming out in the gloaming."
- 2 the time of day immediately following sunset wordnet
- 3 Sullenness; melancholy. obsolete
- 1 present participle and gerund of gloam form-of, gerund, participle, present
Example
More examples"He paced up and down the ship's deck in the gloaming."
Etymology
From a dialectal variant of glooming, from Middle English *gloming, from Old English glōmung, from Old English glōm (“twilight”). By surface analysis, gloom + -ing. Related to glow. The OED notes: "The vowel of the modern gloaming is anomalous, as Old English glōmung should normally become glooming. The explanation is probably that the ō was shortened in the compound ǣfen-glommung (as the spelling seems to show was actually the case), and that from this compound there was evolved a new subject glŏmung, which by normal phonetic development became Middle English glǭming, modern English gloaming."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.