black
/blak
/- The first attacker was 6ft tall with short blond hair and was wearing black trousers and a white T-shirt.
- Bundles of chemical sticks lay ready to be burnt in it, some making black smoke and some white.
- The video showed a white truck exploding and black plumes of smoke billowing into the air.
- I can see the stars and the sky and the moon and the black sky revolving overhead.
- There were no trees overhead, so he was exposed to the full power of the dark clouds, barely visible in the now black sky.
- Sasha looked up and saw a black sky spotted with stars through the spaces in between the trees.
Synonyms
- The workers are black with dirt and perspiration that the four fans on the ceiling do not dry.
- The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black, with age and dirt.
- Inside the garage door the concrete was stained black with oil and a car was hoisted on a ramp.
- The crested black macque was called the Celebes or black ape by early scientists, because it appeared to have no tail.
- The bees are of the old Irish black bee variety which have been revived by the group of beekeepers.
- The County Council intends to plant black poplars along the River Lune in autumn.
- Instead, drink lots of water, a cup of skim or soy milk, or a cup of black coffee or tea.
- Trust me, if you're really a caffeine junkie, you're drinking espressos and black coffee.
- Small amounts of water or black coffee may be safe if taken a sufficient time before your procedure.
- If it includes one or more wild cards, it is called a mixed or black canasta; it is squared up with a natural black card on top.
- If it contains one or more wild cards, it is a mixed canasta, indicated by stacking the cards with a black card on top.
- If you currently ski blue and groomed black runs this is the camp for you.
- The Base and Run 63 are perfect for beginners, and there are also black ski runs, bumps and jumps for the more advanced.
- Human Rights Watch says black Africans are deliberately being driven off the land.
- The buzzer sounds and I smile out at a black African with a briefcase.
- He set a big example for the rest of the country and for all black South Africans.
- Anthony says mainstream culture is becoming ripe with curiosity about black culture.
- This has very little to do with opprotunity, but a great deal to do with black culture.
- Johnson was a banner figure for artists of the great 1960s revival in black culture.
- Perhaps however the truth lies somewhere in between and the situation is not as black as some perceive it to be.
- In the North East, once ships stopped being built, a black depression hung over the region.
- It was a black mood at a black moment, a spasm that sentient Americans prefer to forget.
Synonyms
- For the past ten years, Joanne had suffered from depression and took medication to control her black moods.
- I've had no periods of black depression about it, no waking up in cold sweats.
- Those moments of wild inspiration have a payback time and it comes in periods of black depression.
Synonyms
- These people are also kind of childish, and if confronted by the world directly seem to only be able to understand it in terms of black humour.
- She also revealed the black humour used in the surgery.
- Well, that's going too far - but it is certainly Swiftian satire, black humour or gallows humour.
Synonyms
- She was going to set him free from all of the evil and black hatred he had brought to the world.
- I felt a surge of hatred pass through me, black vicious hatred that I had never felt before.
- He had never lied to her a full black lie; but merely a few small white ones that did no damage at all.
Synonyms
- Other colours include midnight black, ocean blue, rose pink and olive green.
- The classroom, painted in its sober colours of beige and black, is half-full.
- The finished article was painted in glossy black, the colour of the original vehicle, to make it look new.
- Her last wishes state that there should be no mourning and that no black is to be worn to the service.
- She was startled and looked up to see that the man was dressed in all black with a hood on his face.
- Guns were aimed at him from the men dressed in all black, masks covering their faces.
- The cold black of night is penetrated by an alien tone, played upon an inhuman scale.
- My spot in the grass disappeared and I was left with just darkness and total black.
- All about her was either the black of night and shadows or the orange of flame.
- Now Black has two rooks covering his back rank, so one of them can be freed up for central duty.
- The move chosen in the game gives Black a slight edge without giving up a pawn.
- Tha was a very precise move which forces Black to make a passive recapture with the bishop.
- The 1992 UK champion potted the first 12 reds and blacks, but in potting the 13 th red into the middle he over-screwed the cueball.
- He potted 13 reds and 12 blacks before losing position on the colour.
- In Brazil, the African Brazilian population comprises blacks and mulattos.
- I have just put up a paper here that gives the detailed results of a survey of what South African whites thought of blacks during the Apartheid era.
- The company recruited battle-hardened and disciplined South Africans and Zimbabweans, blacks as well as whites.
- Also, you've learned that staying out of the red and keeping in the black gives you more money to save and invest.
- To the markets now, the big stocks were back in the black today, making up all of yesterday's losses.
- Invest wisely in IT and you'll keep your eternal balance sheet in the black.
Synonyms
- Guilt is the great disguiser, blacking the white of the sun.
- This stuff doesn't just black the buildings, it causes asthma and stunts the development of children's lungs.
- I lighted the fires and blacked the grates.
- The theme was ‘colonials and natives’ and some of the guests had blacked their faces.
- She said that on May 1, last year, he blacked his face, put on camouflage clothing and went to the site.
- I was a little uncomfortable to say the least when I saw members of the cast were blacked up but I assumed they must have been given permission to do so.
- Their defiance sparked a huge wave of international solidarity that saw English dockers blacking Irish goods and collections taken in workplaces across Britain.
- By 20 January the cabinet was so desperate to crush the miners it considered sending in troops to move the coal which had been blacked by other workers.
- The union decided to vent its frustrations on the radio station's abolishing such institutions as the orchestra during a cost cutting exercise by blacking its music programmes for ten weeks in 1980.
Synonyms
Usage
Black has been used to refer to African peoples and their descendants since at least the late 14th century. Although the word has been in continuous use ever since, other terms have enjoyed prominence too: in the US coloured was the term adopted in preference by emancipated slaves following the American Civil War, and coloured was itself superseded in the US in the early 20th century by Negro as the term preferred by prominent black American campaigners such as Booker T. Washington. In Britain, on the other hand, coloured was the most widely used and accepted term in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, black was adopted by Americans of African origin to signify a sense of racial pride, and it remains the most widely used and generally accepted term in Britain today. In the US African American replaced black in many contexts during the 1980s, but both are now generally acceptable.
Phrases
black someone's eye
in someone's black books
look on the black side
men in black
the new black
not as black as one is painted
Phrasal verbs
black out
black something out
Derivatives
blackish
/ adjective ...- It has a thin, black bill, dark gray to blackish legs, dark patches on either side of the upper breast, and dark ear patches.
- At 11 p.m., it looked like a blackish dark gray B - 2 bomber, but then it shot sharply forward only to slow down and stop.
- Her wings turned from silver bright to blackish dark.
blackly
/ adverb ...- Of the film, he says, ‘You can either make it more like a horror [film], or you can make it blackly comic.’
- There's even a visceral and blackly humorous moment where the actors demonstrate exactly what's going to happen to the planet using a lighter, a peach and a can of air freshener.
- There is a smaller room that shows Goya's pinturas negras, blackly painted at the end of his life, when the artist was suffering from depression and slowly going mad.
Origin
Old English blæc, of Germanic origin.
Since the Middle Ages the word black has had connotations of gloom, foreboding, and anger, and since Shakespeare's time it has been associated with wickedness. It is also a perennially stylish colour, and the little black dress has been a byword of fashion from the very beginning of the 20th century. The car manufacturer Henry Ford was not motivated by any of these associations when he said of his Model T Ford, ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black’—nor was he trying to impose uniformity. Black simply dried quicker than any other paint. To blackball (late 18th century) derives from the practice of registering an adverse vote by placing a black ball in a ballot box. Black sheep (late 18th century) comes from the proverb there is a black sheep in every flock. Blackguard (early 16th century) was originally a two-word phrase for a body of attendants or servants, especially menials who were responsible for the kitchen utensils, but the exact significance of the epithet ‘black’ is uncertain. The sense ‘scoundrel, villain’ dates from the mid 18th century, and was formerly considered highly offensive.
To be in someone's black books is to be out of favour. Since the 15th century various types of official book were known as black books, especially those used to note down misdemeanours and punishments. The relevant books here are probably the black-bound books in which Henry VIII's commissioners recorded accounts of scandals and corruption within the English monasteries in the 1530s. These books provided the evidence to support Henry's plan of breaking with the Pope and the Church of Rome, allowing him to dissolve the monasteries.
Not all things called black are black in colour. An aircraft's black box, its flight recorder, for instance, is not. Black here refers to the mystifying nature of the device to anyone but an aeronautical engineer. The first use of black box is as RAF slang for a navigational instrument in an aircraft which allowed the pilot and crew to locate bombing targets in poor visibility. See also plague