Other forms: obscured, obscuring, obscures
Obscure means known to almost nobody. An obscure band with three hundred listeners, an obscure rule buried on page forty of the tax form, a poet nobody read until a century after he died.
The other half of the adjective is hard to make out: obscure handwriting, an obscure argument you read twice and still miss. As a verb it means to block or blur — clouds obscure the moon, a hedge obscures the view, jargon obscures the point. The noun is obscurity, and a writer can live in it, sink into it, or be pulled out of it by one good review. Careful with the tone: obscure is not a fancy word for strange. An obscure film is one nobody has seen, not a weird one.
1adjectiveadjKnown to very few people.~63%
“He collects obscure jazz records from the 1960s.”
synonyms: little-known, unknown
2adjectiveunclearHard to see, hear or understand.~32%
“The reason for the decision remains obscure.”
3verbobscureTo hide something from sight or from understanding.~5%
“A row of new flats now obscures the church tower.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Obscure came through Old French obscur from Latin obscūrus, 'dark, dusky, indistinct'. The Latin is ob- plus scūrus, which runs back through Proto-Italic to a Proto-Indo-European root. The unknown band and the unclear sentence are both, in the oldest sense, in the dark.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ḱeh₃-
Proto-Italic
*skoiros
Latin
obscūrus — dark, dusky, indistinct
Old French
obscur
Middle English
obscure
English, today
obscure
From Middle English obscure, from Old French obscur, from Latin obscūrus (“dark, dusky, indistinct”), from ob- + scūrus, from Proto-Italic skoiros, from Proto-Indo-European (s)ḱeh₃-. a doublet of oscuro.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA