Word.ws English Dictionary

bible-black

bible-black adjective: having the colour of a Bible bound in black.

bible-black: having the colour of a Bible bound in black
Image: Hoshie, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

bible-black (not comparable)

  1. (literary) Having the colour of a Bible bound in black.
    • It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.1954, Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood […] , New York: New Directions
    • The sky was Bible black in Lyon / When I met the Magdalene / She was paralysed in a streetlight / She refused to give her name1985, Marillion, “Bitter Suite”, in Misplaced Childhood

Forms of bible-black

alternative formbible black
alternative formBible-black
alternative formBible black
alternative formBible Black

Origin of bible-black

From the fact that personal Bibles were formerly often bound in a black cover.

Questions about bible-black

What does bible-black mean?
Bible-black means having the colour of a Bible bound in black.
What part of speech is bible-black?
Bible-black is an adjective.

Words near bible-black in the dictionary

  1. Bible thumper
  2. Bible thumpers
  3. Bible thumping
  4. Bible-basher
  5. Bible-bashers
  6. bible-black
  7. Bible-pounder
  8. Bible-pounders
  9. Bible-puncher
  10. Bible-punchers
  11. Bible-thumper

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bible-black (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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