Word.ws English Dictionary

dim

/dɪm/

dim adjective: not bright or colorful. Also the clipping of diminished.

Adjective

dim (comparative dimmer, superlative dimmest)

  1. Not bright or colorful.
    • The lighting was too dim for me to make out his facial features.
    • that sustaining Love / Which, through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea, / Burns bright or dim1821, Percy B[ysshe] Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, […], Pisa, Italy: […] Didot; reprinted London: Noel Douglas […], 1927, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    dull, dingy
  2. (colloquial) Not smart or intelligent.
    • He may be a bit dim, but he's not entirely stupid.
  3. Indistinct, hazy or unclear.
    • His vision grew dimmer as he aged.
  4. Disapproving, unfavorable: rarely used outside the phrase take a dim view of.

Noun

dim (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) Dimness.
    • All about me the Red Weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dim. Night, the Mother of Fear and Mystery, was coming upon me.1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 278

Verb

dim (third-person singular simple present dims, present participle dimming, simple past and past participle dimmed)

  1. (transitive) To make something less bright.
    • He dimmed the lights and put on soft music.
  2. (intransitive) To become darker.
    • The lights dimmed briefly when the air conditioning was turned on.
  3. To render dim, obscure, or dark; to make less bright or distinct.
    • a king among his courtiers,[…] who out to dim the lustre of all his attendants1695, C[harles] A[lphonse] du Fresnoy, translated by John Dryden, De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting, […], London: […] J[ohn] Heptinstall for W. Rogers, […], →OCLC
    • Now ſet the ſun, and twilight dimm'd the ways, […]1791, Homer, “[The Odyssey.] Book II.”, in W[illiam] Cowper, transl., The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, Translated into Blank Verse, […], volume II, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], →OCLC, page 42...
  4. To deprive of distinct vision; to hinder from seeing clearly, either by dazzling or clouding the eyes; to darken the senses or understanding of.
    • And with our Sun-bright armour as we march,
      Weel chaſe the Starrs from heauen, and dim their eies
      That ſtand and muſe at our admyred armes.c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC...
    • Her starry eyes were dimm'd with streaming tears.1740, Christopher Pitt, The Aeneid
  5. (figuratively) To diminish, dull, or curtail.
    • All these setbacks had started to dim the hopes of the students.
    • Nothing will dim their spirit of resilience.

Proper noun capitalized: Dim

Dim

  1. A male given name (from Bashkir Дим) .
  2. (singular, vocative) vocative singular of Ди́ма (Díma)(•colloquial)

Also used as

dim is also the clipping of diminished.

dim meaning in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada

dim in Tamil

to make something less bright
மங்கலான maṅkalāṉa

dim in Telugu

not bright, not colourful
మసక masaka

dim in Malayalam

മങ്ങിയ, ഡിം

dim in Kannada

ಡಿಮ್, ಡಿಂ
More languagesFewer languages
dim in Thai
มัว muua
dim in Vietnamese
mờ, nhòa

Examples of dim in a sentence

  • This club takes a dim view of members who deal drugs.
  • When's this film supposed to begin? Ah, there we go; the lights are dimming now.
  • The houselights were dimmed as the curtain went up for the start of the play.

All 40 example sentences with dim

Synonyms of dim

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of dim

Forms of dim

Adjective
comparativedimmer
superlativedimmest
Verb
third-person singular presentdims
present participledimming
past participledimmed
pastdimmed

Past tense of dim: dimmed

Origin of dim

From Middle English dim, dym, from Old English dim, dimm (“dim, dark, gloomy; wretched, grievous, sad, unhappy”), from Proto-West Germanic *dimm, from Proto-Germanic *dimmaz (“dark”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰem- (“to whisk, smoke; obscure”). Compare Faroese dimmur (“dark”), Icelandic dimmur (“dark”) and dimma (“darkness”).

From Bashkir.

Words formed from dim

Phrases with dim

Words that rhyme with dim

35 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dim

What does dim mean?
Dim means not bright or colorful.
What is dim in Tamil?
Dim in Tamil is மங்கலான (maṅkalāṉa). See Dim meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is dim?
Dim can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce dim?
Dim is pronounced /dɪm/.

Words near dim in the dictionary

  1. Dilworth
  2. Dilworths
  3. dilysine
  4. Dilzak
  5. Dilzaks
  6. dim
  7. dim and distant
  8. dim bulb
  9. dim bulbs
  10. dim mak
  11. dim out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dim (page history and authors); Dim (page history and authors); dim (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); dim (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: En-us-dim.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dim.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dim. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.