black hole
UK/blæk ˈhəʊl//blæk ˈhoʊl/
black hole noun: a place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
Noun
black hole (plural black holes)
- A place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
- ‘I will convince you that I do know [my duty] by clapping you for the remainder of the night into the black hole, young gentleman, do you see, and have no doubt but the air of that agreeable apartment will restore your senses.’1808–10, William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, Folio Society 1995, p. 282
- A discipline of unlimited autocracy, upheld by rods, and ferules, and the black hole.1860, Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical
- A region of spacetime that exerts a gravitational pull strong enough that no matter or energy, not even light, can escape it.
- Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.2019 April 10, Hannah Devlin, The Guardian
- A void into which things disappear for good; an inscrutable area or subject.
- you'll have to love U.S. District Court Judge John Kane's decision to keep Denver-based Exactis.com out of an Internet black hole.... MAPS maintains a database of Internet addresses that it believes send or relay spam. It’s called the "Realtime Blackhole List"2000 November 26, Linda Seebach, “Unwanted e-mail belongs in an Internet black hole”, in RockyMountainNews.com
- I finished some client work and gave myself 30 minutes to fall down one of my favorite internet black holes: genealogical research. Four hours plus some later, my eyes were burning in my head2004 November 16, Jenifer Hanen, “How I fell down an Internet Black Hole....”, Black Phoebe, at www.blackphoebe.com https://web.archive.org/web/20061017203928/http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/archives...
- A dangerous optical illusion that can occur on a nighttime approach with dark, featureless terrain between the aircraft and a brightly-lit runway, where the aircraft appears to the pilots to be higher up than it actually is, potentially triggering a premature or overly-steep descent and a crash short of the runway.
- A place where incoming traffic is silently discarded.
- One way of fighting spam is to use a blackhole list maintained on a blackhole server.
- A bit bucket; a place of permanent oblivion for data.
Verb
black hole (third-person singular simple present black holes, present participle black holing, simple past and past participle black holed)
- To redirect (network traffic, etc.) nowhere; to discard (incoming traffic).
- Select a nonglobally routed prefix, such as the Test-Net (RFC 3330) 192.0.2.0/24, to use as the next hop of any attacked prefix to be blackholed.2005, Victor Oppleman, Oliver Friedrichs, Brett Watson, Extreme exploits: advanced defenses against hardcore hacks, page 186
black hole meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu
black hole in Hindi
- celestial body
- कृष्ण विवर kŕṣṇa vivar
black hole in Tamil
- celestial body
- கருங்குழி karuṅkuḻi, கருந்துளை karuntuḷai
black hole in Marathi
- celestial body
- कृष्णविवर kŕṣṇavivar
black hole in Urdu
- celestial body
- ثقب اسود suqb asvad
More languagesFewer languages
- black hole in Bengali
- কৃষ্ণগহ্বর kriśnogohbor, কৃষ্ণবিবর kriśnobibor, ব্ল্যাকহোল blêk-hol, ব্ল্যাক হোল blêk hol
- black hole in Telugu
- కాలబిలము kālabilamu
- black hole in Malayalam
- തമോദ്വാരം tamōdvāraṁ, തമോഗർത്തം tamōgaṟttaṁ
- black hole in Kannada
- ಕಪ್ಪು ಕುಳಿ kappu kuḷi
- black hole in Gujarati
- કૃષ્ણ વિવર kŕṣṇ vivar
- black hole in Sanskrit
- कृष्ण विवर kṛṣṇa vivara
- black hole in Tagalog
- itim na butas
- black hole in Arabic
- ثُقْب أَسْوَد ṯuqb ʔaswad
- black hole in Malay
- lohong hitam
- black hole in Indonesian
- lubang hitam
- black hole in Persian
- سیاهچاله فضایی siyâh-čâle fazâyi, سیاهچاله siyâh-čâle
- black hole in Thai
- หลุมดำ lǔm-dam
- black hole in Vietnamese
- hố đen, lỗ đen
Examples of black hole in a sentence
- All Privates and Buglers confined in the black hole are to be fed on bread and water, to be taken out occasionally for drill, and re-lodged immediately after.1898, The Rifle Brigade Chronicle for 1897, London, page 97:
- “It is by far the worst Internet black hole,” he said.2006 October 23, Tom Zeller Jr., “The Internet Black Hole That Is North Korea”, in The New York Times:
- In fact, with regards to spoken language, what we were looking at was a rather large black hole in the data, and hence was born the AOT method.2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual...
Antonyms of black hole
Forms of black hole
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | black holes |
| alternative form | black-hole |
| alternative form | blackhole |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | black holes |
| present participle | black holing |
| past participle | black holed |
| past | black holed |
Origin of black hole
In reference to the physical concept (region of spacetime with extreme gravitational pull), physicist Hong-Yee Chiu attributed the term to his colleague Robert H. Dicke, who stated around 1960–1961 that the objects were like the Black Hole of Calcutta. The first known usage in print was by journalist Ann Ewing in 1964. Widespread popularization of the term is generally credited to a lecture in 1967 by the physicist John Wheeler.
Words formed from black hole
- black hole jet
- black hole star
- blanet
- BZ black hole
- eternal black hole
- extremal black hole
- intermediate black hole
- intermediate mass black hole
- Kerr black hole
- Kerr-Newman black hole
- micro black hole
- mini black hole
- optical black hole
- primordial black hole
- regular black hole
- Reissner-Nordström black hole
- Schwarzschild black hole
- stellar black hole
- stellar mass black hole
- supermassive black hole
Questions about black hole
- What does black hole mean?
- Black hole means a place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
- What is black hole in Hindi?
- Black hole in Hindi is कृष्ण विवर (kŕṣṇa vivar). See Black hole meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use black hole in a sentence?
- All Privates and Buglers confined in the black hole are to be fed on bread and water, to be taken out occasionally for drill, and re-lodged immediately after.
- What part of speech is black hole?
- Black hole can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce black hole?
- Black hole is pronounced /blæk ˈhoʊl/ (US).
- What is the plural of black hole?
- The plural of black hole is black holes.
Words near black hole in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: black hole (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-black hole.wav.
Cite this entry: “black hole.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/black_hole. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.