Other forms: murks
Murk is thick darkness or gloom you cannot see through. Peer into the murk, out of the murk, the murk of a winter afternoon.
It is a literary word and rarely heard in speech, where the adjective murky does all the work: murky water, a murky afternoon. Murky has a strong figurative use meaning shady and hard to investigate — murky dealings, a murky past — and that is now probably its commonest sense. Note that murk suits fog, deep water and dusk equally, and always suggests that something is hidden in it.
1nounmurkThick darkness you cannot see through.
“Something moved in the murk and did not move again.”
murk is darkness.
Old Norse myrkr meant dark, and English took it early. Murky, murk and the place name element mirk all descend from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to flicker or grow dark — the same root behind the word for twilight in several languages.
Proto-Indo-European
*mergʷ- — to flicker; to darken; to be dark
Proto-Germanic
*merkuz — dark
Old Norse
myrkr — dark, murky
Old English
mirce
Middle English
merke
English, today
murk
Built from
From Middle English merke, mirke, from Old English mirce, myrce (“dark, gloomy, evil”) and Old Norse myrkr (“dark, murky”), both from Proto-Germanic merkuz (“dark”), from Proto-Indo-European mergʷ- (“to flicker; to darken; to be dark”). Cognate Danish mørk (“dark”), Norwegian mørk (“dark”), Swedish mörk (“dark”), Icelandic myrkur (“dark”), as also Albanian murg (“dark”), Proto-Slavic morkъ (“darkness”), Lithuanian márgas (“multicolored”), murzinas (“dirty, spoiled”), Ancient Greek ἀμορβός (“dark”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA