- Being of the color black, producing or reflecting comparatively little light and having no predominant hue.
- Having little or no light: a black, moonless night.
- often Black
- Of or belonging to a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin: the Black population of South Africa.
- Of or belonging to an American ethnic group descended from African peoples having dark skin; African-American.
- Very dark in color: rich black soil; black, wavy hair.
- Soiled, as from soot; dirty: feet black from playing outdoors.
- Evil; wicked: the pirates' black deeds.
- Cheerless and depressing; gloomy: black thoughts.
- Being or characterized by morbid or grimly satiric humor: a black comedy.
- Marked by anger or sullenness: gave me a black look.
- Attended with disaster; calamitous: a black day; the stock market crash on Black Friday.
- Deserving of, indicating, or incurring censure or dishonor: “Man … has written one of his blackest records as a destroyer on the oceanic islands” (Rachel Carson).
- Wearing clothing of the darkest visual hue: the black knight.
- Served without milk or cream: black coffee.
- Appearing to emanate from a source other than the actual point of origin. Used chiefly of intelligence operations: black propaganda; black radio transmissions.
- Disclosed, for reasons of security, only to an extremely limited number of authorized persons; very highly classified: black programs in the Defense Department; the Pentagon's black budget.
- Chiefly British. Boycotted as part of a labor union action.
- The achromatic color value of minimum lightness or maximum darkness; the color of objects that absorb nearly all light of all visible wavelengths; one extreme of the neutral gray series, the opposite being white. Although strictly a response to zero stimulation of the retina, the perception of black appears to depend on contrast with surrounding color stimuli.
- A pigment or dye having this color value.
- Complete or almost complete absence of light; darkness.
- Clothing of the darkest hue, especially such clothing worn for mourning.
- often Black
- A member of a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin.
- An American descended from peoples of African origin having brown to black skin; an African American.
- Something that is colored black.
- Games.
- The black-colored pieces, as in chess or checkers.
- The player using these pieces.
v., blacked, black·ing, blacks. v.tr.
- To make black: blacked their faces with charcoal.
- To apply blacking to: blacked the stove.
- Chiefly British. To boycott as part of a labor union action.
To become black.
phrasal verb:black out
- To lose consciousness or memory temporarily: blacked out at the podium.
- To suppress (a fact or memory, for example) from conscious recognition: blacked out many of my wartime experiences.
- To prohibit the dissemination of, especially by censorship: blacked out the news issuing from the rebel provinces.
- To extinguish or conceal all lights that might help enemy aircraft find a target during an air raid.
- To extinguish all the lights on (a stage).
- To cause a failure of electrical power in: Storm damage blacked out much of the region.
- To withhold (a televised event or program) from a broadcast area: blacked out the football game on local stations.
- To withhold a televised event or program from: blacked out the entire state to increase ticket sales.
in the black
- On the credit side of a ledger; prosperous.
[Middle English blak, from Old English blæc.]
blackish black'ish adj.blackly black'ly adv.
blackness black'ness n.
USAGE NOTE The Oxford English Dictionary contains evidence of the use of black with reference to African peoples as early as 1400, and certainly the word has been in wide use in racial and ethnic contexts ever since. However, it was not until the late 1960s that black (or Black) gained its present status as a self-chosen ethnonym with strong connotations of racial pride, replacing the then-current Negro among Blacks and non-Blacks alike with remarkable speed. Equally significant is the degree to which Negro became discredited in the process, reflecting the profound changes taking place in the Black community during the tumultuous years of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The recent success of African American offers an interesting contrast in this regard. Though by no means a modern coinage, African American achieved sudden prominence at the end of the 1980s when several Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, championed it as an alternative ethnonym for Americans of African descent. The appeal of this term is obvious, alluding as it does not to skin color but to an ethnicity constructed of geography, history, and culture, and it won rapid acceptance in the media alongside similar forms such as Asian American, Hispanic American, and Italian American. But unlike what happened a generation earlier, African American has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive. The difference may well lie in the fact that the campaign for African American came at a time of relative social and political stability, when Americans in general and Black Americans in particular were less caught up in issues involving radical change than they were in the 1960s. • Black is sometimes capitalized in its racial sense, especially in the African-American press, though the lowercase form is still widely used by authors of all races. The capitalization of Black does raise ancillary problems for the treatment of the term white. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable. Uppercase White is also sometimes associated with the writings of white supremacist groups, a sufficient reason of itself for many to dismiss it. On the other hand, the use of lowercase white in the same context as uppercase Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has distinguished between the two groups. There is no entirely happy solution to this problem. In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form Black.
