Other forms: darker, darkest
Dark means with little or no light. A dark room, a dark night, it gets dark early in winter. It is one of the first hundred adjectives a learner needs and it never stops being useful.
It also describes colour — dark blue, dark hair — where it means deep rather than pale, and it is placed directly before the colour word with no hyphen. From the absence of light come the figurative senses: dark humour is grim, a dark period is unhappy, and a dark secret is one somebody hopes stays hidden. The noun is always the dark, with the: afraid of the dark, home before dark, and that second phrase drops the article, which is a fixed exception worth learning whole.
1adjectivedarkWith little or no light.~38%
“It was too dark to read the sign.”
2adjectivecolourOf a colour, deep rather than pale.~12%
“She was wearing a dark green coat.”
3nounabsenceThe absence of light.~25%
“He is still afraid of the dark.”
4adjectiveunhappyUnhappy, grim, or threatening.~25%
“That was a dark year for the whole town.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
dark is a state of little light.
Old English deorc goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning dim or dull. It is one of the small set of basic sensory adjectives — dark, light, hot, cold, sweet — that English has held onto from its oldest layer without borrowing a replacement.
Middle English
derk
English, today
dark
From Middle English derk. From Middle English derk, from Old English deorc, from Proto-West Germanic derk (“dark”), of uncertain origin, but possibly from Proto-Indo-European dʰerg- (“dim, dull”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰer- (“dull, dirty”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA