Word.ws English Dictionary

pitchy

/ˈpɪt͡ʃi/

pitchy adjective: of, pertaining to, or resembling pitch.

Adjective (1)

pitchy (comparative pitchier, superlative pitchiest)

  1. Of, pertaining to, or resembling pitch.
  2. Very dark black; pitch-black.
    • Mancunium, Manceaster, what we now call Manchester, spins no cotton […] The Creek of the Mersey gurgles, twice in the four-and-twenty hours, with eddying brine, clangorous with sea-fowl; and is a Lither-Pool, a lazy or sullen Pool, no monstrous pitchy City, and Seahaven of the world!1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. 5, Twelfth Century”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book II (The Ancient Monk)
    • In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway.1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 280

Adjective (2)

pitchy (comparative pitchier, superlative pitchiest)

  1. Off pitch; out of tune.
    • […] “Auto Tune”—digital voice processing initially designed to correct a “pitchy” (out-of-tune) singer's voice.2014, Mellonee V. Burnim, Portia K. Maultsby, African American Music, page 381

Examples of pitchy in a sentence

  • But each time the night over the hills remained pitchy black.1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 215:
  • To make it worse, something went wrong wit the Glow-worm's lighting system, and the room was in pitchy darkness.1961, Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach, Knopf, page 44:

Forms of pitchy

comparativepitchier
superlativepitchiest

Origin of pitchy

From Middle English pycchy, pychy, equivalent to pitch + -y.

From pitch + -y.

Words formed from pitchy

Words that rhyme with pitchy

Questions about pitchy

What does pitchy mean?
Pitchy means of, pertaining to, or resembling pitch.
How do you use pitchy in a sentence?
But each time the night over the hills remained pitchy black.
What part of speech is pitchy?
Pitchy is an adjective.
How do you pronounce pitchy?
Pitchy is pronounced /ˈpɪt͡ʃi/.

Words near pitchy in the dictionary

  1. pitchurie
  2. pitchwise
  3. pitchwoman
  4. pitchwomen
  5. pitchwood
  6. pitchy
  7. pitcoal
  8. Pitcock
  9. Pitcocks
  10. Pitcombe
  11. Pitcox

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pitchy (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-pitchy.wav.

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