Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An area of space-time with a gravitational field so intense that its escape velocity is equal to or exceeds the speed of light.
- n. A great void; an abyss: The government created a bureaucratic black hole that swallows up individual initiative.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a place of confinement for soldiers; any dismal place for confinement by way of punishment.
Wiktionary
- n. A gravitationally domineering celestial body with an event horizon from which even light cannot escape; the most dense material in the universe, condensed into a singularity, usually formed by a collapsing massive star.
- n. A sphere of influence into which or from which communication or similar activity is precluded.
- n. An entity which consumes time or resources without demonstrable utility.
- n. A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or guardroom.
GNU Webster's 1913
- A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or guardroom; -- now commonly with allusion to the cell (the Black Hole) in a fort at Calcutta (called the
Black Hole of Calcutta ), into which 146 English prisoners were thrust by the nabob Suraja Dowla on the night of June 20, 1765, and in which 123 of the prisoners died before morning from lack of air. - (Physics, Astron.) An astronomical object whose mass is so condensed that the gravitational force does not allow anything, even light, to escape from its outer limit (the event horizon). The existence of such objects was first proposed from theoretical considerations. Because light cannot escape from such objects, they have not yet been detected with certainty (1998), but several "candidates" have been observed whose properties strongly suggest that they are
black holes . Some theorists suggest that the centers of many galaxies may have large black holes at their cores. See also escape velocity. - Fig., Jocose a place into which things may enter, but can never emerge.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a region of space resulting from the collapse of a star; extremely high gravitational field
Examples
“So here the cave turned upward, became a narrow tunnel; and up that black hole Kolki Ming had gone.”
The Lion Game
“By the early autumn of 1981, Allen had some twenty different issues requiring full NSC attention that were languishing in the black hole that was Meeses inbox.”
“The Mayan shamans, for example, discovered the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and their astronomers ascertained the precession of the equinoxes long before modern science did.”
“Many TFNGs would grow to loathe the Abbey-Young duopoly and its black hole of communication.”
“Jamie was so embarrassed he liketa died and he was feeling hopeful about at least dropping into a black hole to disappear.”
“He was always “scairy” if he had to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime: “I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'em out.””
Our Friend John Burroughs
“This is not an instance of one galaxy colliding with another and absorbing it, or of a supermassive black hole or other identifiable astronomical phenomenon siphoning off stellar mass.”
Running from the Deity
“When, say, she discovers in Sixteen Candles that a seemingly sweet geek has charged admission for boys to view her pink-polka-dotted panties, she makes her full-lipped mouth a black hole of sheerest teen horror.”
“Assuming that mental states supervene on brain states, there is thus a finite probability that a black hole will produce a brain in a state of making any given observation.”
“Then someone poked him in the ribs and he looked down and saw a black hole in the lapel of his powder blue Wah Ming Chow custom suit.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘black hole’.
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science fact or fiction
pretty open-ended here—terms, ideas, lingo, technologies and phenomena (real or postulated) that are, were, should be or could be used in speculative fiction
tachyon, mecha, dropship, wetware, meatspace, nanobot, cloned meat, asteroid mining, hyperdrive, wormhole, parallel universe, distributed intel... and 464 more...
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50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
walking, bicycle, bus, train, motorcycle, airplane, car, truck, segway, limousine, roller coaster, wheelbarrow and 130 more...
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I Am A Starfish. I Speak With Paint.
List title totally stolen from she. Right, the stock entry for this list should be a two-word phrase where one of the words denotes a colour; even better if the expression has some metaphoric value...
black dog, tangerine dream, orange roughy, blue moon, blackguard, white house, purple rain, grey nurse, green thumb, yellow fever, sacre bleu, palo verde and 159 more...
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In The Name Of All That Is Good And H...
Here you will find pieholes rather than piety. If you seek that which is holy, you must find the list In The Name Of All That Is Good And Holy... by uselessness.
piehole, doughnut hole, cakehole, the rabbit hole, hole in one, Swiss cheese, potatohole, three-hole punch, portable hole, hellhole, cholent, cholera and 89 more...
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mother nature
interesting acts of nature
( randomness, visual, setting, environment )firefly squid dro..., tornado, circumhorizontal arc, rainbow, waterfall, murmuration, hail, snow, glacier, volcano, giant redwoods, northern lights and 31 more...
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science (collective opinion)
random scientific terms from a group of one hundred 16-18 year olds to choose 100 words that, in their collective opinion, represent crucial factors and concepts influencing trends in science today...
acid, base, aggregation status, analysis, antimatter, apparatus, atmosphere, atom, bacteria, Big Bang, biodiversity, bioethics and 90 more...
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Cage
cage, depart, nothing, void, strain, unconscious, never, alone, floor, God, hell, winter and 219 more...
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Gotim
Aries, fire, chaos, destruction, Mars, aggression, bold, competetive, conflict, raw, black, red and 165 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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chromatic phrases
blue movie, brown study, purple prose, rosy scenario, golden mean, eminence grise, white nights, bronze age, silver bullet, orange juice, black death, technicolor yawn and 188 more...
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Nihilarity
Absurdity, dark art, radicalism, anger, tragic irony, and nothingness. Tee-hee!
nihilism, dada, futurism, rayonism, postmodernity, deconstruction, surrealism, existentialism, reductio ad absurdum, discordianism, operation mindfuck, amorality and 127 more...
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My God, It's Full of Stars!
stellar black hole, micro black hole, black hole, collapsar, hypernova, supernova, nova, variable star, stellar core, strange star, quark star, compact star and 37 more...
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Colour my Wordie!
Words and short phrases with colour names in them
blackguard, black box, black market, blue moon, blue-collar worker, true-blue, blue-blooded, pink slip, tickled pink, pink elephant, white elephant, white gold and 81 more...
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voca22000_6
voca22000_6
the solar system, planet, comet, meteor, eclipse, big bang, black hole, gravity, space craft, space shuttle, manned space flight, spacesuit and 2 more...
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outer darkness
black hole, abyss, lack, dearth, nothingness, vacuum, void, thin air, dark, ether, oblivion, emptiness and 16 more...
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Displacemattes
Mysterious places and lands I ought to visit...
antichthon, lubberland, flat earth, shangri-la, dystopia, peristalith, htrae, phaeton, pop star, asgard, melmac, annwn and 78 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for black hole.

seanahan Those are the best kind of jokes, the one where a simple physical truth is expressed in a profound manner. Jan 21, 2008
uselessness "Black holes are where God divided by zero."
-Steven Wright Jan 18, 2008