Dusk is the dim half-hour after the sun has gone and before it is properly dark. Streetlights flicker on, the garden turns grey and blue, and you can still make out the path but not the faces coming up it.
It is a noun and it lives in phrases about time: at dusk, before dusk, from dawn to dusk, dusk fell. Dusk is not sunset, because sunset is the moment and dusk is the light left over, and it is not night, which is what dusk turns into. Twilight is its close twin and works at both ends of the day, while dusk only ever means the evening one. The adjective dusky means dimly lit, and 'the dusk' can stand for the gloom itself, as in 'he disappeared into the dusk'. The morning opposite is dawn.
1nounduskThe dim time after the sun has set and before darkness.
“The bats come out at dusk.”
2nounhalfHalf-darkness; the dim light itself.
“She watched the figure vanish into the dusk.”
dusk is a time of day.
Also accepted in games: twilight, nightfall
Dusk was dox in Old English, meaning dark or swarthy, from Proto-Germanic *duskaz, 'dark, smoky'. The Proto-Indo-European root behind it is about smoke, mist and haze, and it is the same root that gave English dye and dust. Dusk started as a colour word and narrowed down to the hour that wears that colour.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰewh₂-
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰwes-
Proto-Germanic
*duskaz — dark, smoky
Old English
dox — dark, swarthy
Middle English
dosk — dusky
English, today
dusk
Built from
From Middle English dosk (“dusky”), from Old English dox (“dark, swarthy”), from Proto-Germanic duskaz (“dark, smoky”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰwes-, related to dʰewh₂- (“smoke, mist, haze”). Cognate to Latin fuscus (“dark, dusky”), Sanskrit धूसर (“dust-colored”), Old Irish donn (“dark”). Related to dye, dust and dun (see these for more). a doublet of fuscous.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Time & Calendar, A Man Called Ove, Weather & Seasons
First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.
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