Swarthy means having a dark complexion. A swarthy sailor, swarthy features, dark and swarthy.
It is old-fashioned and it carries baggage: in nineteenth-century fiction it marked a character as foreign and often as untrustworthy, and that association is why the word is now largely avoided in description. It is built on swart, an old English word meaning black. Note swarthy is used almost only of men.
1adjectiveswarthyHaving a dark complexion.
“The old fisherman had a swarthy, weathered face and bright blue eyes.”
swarthy is a quality of complexion.
An alteration of swarty, from swart, Old English sweart, meaning black. Swarthy and swart are the same word.
Old English
sweart — black
English, today
swarthy
Alteration of obsolete swarty, from swart + y, from Old English sweart (“black”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA