Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Serving to obscure or darken.
  • adjective Gloomy; dark.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Producing darkness. According to an old fancy, night succeeds to day through the influence of tenebrific stars.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Rendering dark or gloomy; tenebrous; gloomy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective gloomy
  • adjective obscure

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective dark and gloomy

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin tenebrae, darkness + –fic.]

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Examples

  • "Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific passage of the tale."

    Browning's Heroines Ethel Colburn Mayne

  • We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene."

    Robert Burns How To Know Him William Allan Neilson 1907

  • One Didymus is, moreover, related to have written six thousand books on the single subject of grammar, a topic rendered only more tenebrific by the labours of his successors, and which seems still to possess an attraction for authors in proportion as they can make nothing of it.

    The Biglow Papers James Russell Lowell 1855

  • One Didymus is, moreover, related to have written six thousand books on the single subject of grammar, a topic rendered only more tenebrific by the labors of his successors, and which seems still to possess an attraction for authors in proportion as they can make nothing of it.

    The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell James Russell Lowell 1855

  • The _cui bono_ of these doctrines may not, it is true, be expressible by arithmetical computations: the subject also is perplexed with obscurities, and probably with manifold delusions; and too often its interpreters with us have been like 'tenebrific stars,' that 'did ray out darkness' on a matter itself sufficiently dark.

    The Life of Friedrich Schiller Comprehending an Examination of His Works Thomas Carlyle 1838

  • They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion!

    The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. Thomas Carlyle 1838

  • They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion! ” ” ” ” ” ” * Dr. Le Baron Russell; Theodore Parker. ” ” ” ” ” ”

    The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II Carlyle, Thomas 1883

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