Word.ws English Dictionary

go dark

go dark verb: to cease operation or shut down, often for purposes of concealment.

Verb

go dark (third-person singular simple present goes dark, present participle going dark, simple past went dark, past participle gone dark)

  1. (often) To cease operation or shut down, often for purposes of concealment.
  2. (often) To cease communications.
    • “But this third cell,” Butler said, “they went dark. No one had heard from them in months. That is, until the bombs started going off last week.”2009, Vince Flynn, Pursuit of Honor: A Novel, Simon and Schuster, page 204
    • More systems have gone dark as their comm buoys were destroyed, and millions more batarians, trapped on their planets, sit waiting for the Reapers.2012, BioWare, Mass Effect 3 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: The Fall of Khar'shan Codex entry

Forms of go dark

third-person singular presentgoes dark
present participlegoing dark
pastwent dark
past participlegone dark

Questions about go dark

What does go dark mean?
Go dark means to cease operation or shut down, often for purposes of concealment.
What part of speech is go dark?
Go dark is a verb.
What is the past tense of go dark?
The past tense of go dark is went dark.

Words near go dark in the dictionary

  1. go country
  2. go crazy
  3. go cunch
  4. go cup
  5. go cups
  6. go dark
  7. go deep
  8. go down
  9. go down fighting
  10. go down in flames
  11. go down in history

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go dark (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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