Dusk

How to spell dusk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dusk

What does dusk mean?

1. nounThe period of partial darkness as daylight fades into night; twilight.

Dusk in a sentence

• The street lamps switch on automatically at dusk.

• We packed up the picnic just before dusk and drove home.

Where does dusk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dusk traces back to Old English dox, sometimes written dosc, an adjective meaning dark, shadowy, or dull in colour rather than a name for a time of day. The earliest senses described the murky tone of a thing rather than the moment between day and night, so a horse or a cloth could be called dusk. Over the Middle English period the spelling shifted, the letters effectively swapping around from dox to the dosk and then dusk we know, and the meaning narrowed to the dim half-light that falls as the sun goes down. The word belongs to the native Germanic core of English and has no Latin or French ancestry, which is part of why it stayed short and blunt. A useful memory aid is that its closest modern relative is the adjective dusky, meaning shadowy or dark-toned, which preserves that original colour sense.

How the word is built

• dusk (single root, from Old English dox/dosc meaning dark or shadowy); no prefix or suffix