black letter day
black letter day noun: a day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day.
Noun
black letter day (plural black letter days)
- A day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day.
- So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves, only on simple black-letter days when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.1877 December 3, George Eliot, “Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones”, in J. W. Cross, editor, George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, volume III, published 1885, page 233
- But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them.1893, Thomas De Quincey, “Conversation and Coleridge”, in Alexander H. Japp, editor, The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, volume II, London: William Heinemann
Forms of black letter day
| plural | black letter days |
|---|---|
| alternative form | black-letter day |
Questions about black letter day
- What does black letter day mean?
- Black letter day means a day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day.
- What part of speech is black letter day?
- Black letter day is a noun.
- What is the plural of black letter day?
- The plural of black letter day is black letter days.
Words near black letter day in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: black letter day (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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Cite this entry: “black letter day.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/black_letter_day. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.