Word.ws English Dictionary

swarthy

US/ˈswɔɹði/

swarthy adjective: tawny, dusky, dark.

Adjective

swarthy (comparative swarthier, superlative swarthiest)

  1. Tawny, dusky, dark.
  2. (derogatory) Dark-skinned; black.
    • Their swarthy Hosts wou'd darken all our Plains, / Doubling the native Horror of the War, / And making Death more grim.1712, Joseph Addison, Cato: A tragedy, published 1750, page 44
    Synonyms:
    black, dusky, sable, sooty
  3. Darker-skinned than white, but lighter-skinned than tawny; tan.
    • the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as...1751, Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind
    • Yossarian went along in Milo Minderbinder's speeding M & M staff car to police headquarters to meet a swarthy, untidy police commissioner with a narrow black mustache and unbuttoned tunic who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins when they entered his office and who greeted Milo...1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Eternal City”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 425
  4. A dark grey color.
  5. (nonstandard) Evil, malicious.
  6. (nonstandard) Weathered, rough.
    • Mason: "Okay, how do I look, really?"
      Betty: "…'Swarthy.'"
      Mason: "Well, is that good?"
      Betty: "Depends if you like 'swarthy.'"
      Mason: "Do you like 'swarthy'?"
      Betty: "Not particularly."2003, Peter Ocko, “Curious George” (28:10 from the start), in Dead Like Me, season 1, episode 3, Vancouver: MGM, via Showtime

Noun

swarthy (plural swarthies)

  1. A swarthy person.
    • Finally I saw all our Italian women and my mother, torn in pieces, cut up, massacred by the monsters who contended for them ; the captives, my companions, the Moors who had taken us, the soldiers, the sailors, the blacks, the whites, the swarthies, the mulattoes, and lastly, my captain himself...1900, The Whole Prose Romances of François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, page 70
    • Then one of the swarthies popped a couple of shovels of coal into the small fo'c's'le stove — for it was cold that July night Down Under — and everyone began to talk.1962, The Skipper, volume 22, page 21

swarthy meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Kannada

swarthy in Tamil

கருநிறத் தோல் கொண்ட

swarthy in Urdu

پکے رنگ کا, سانولا, سیاہ, تاریک

swarthy in Malayalam

ഇരുണ്ട, കരിന്തവിട്ടു നിറമുള്ള

swarthy in Kannada

ಕಪ್ಪಾದ, ಬಿಸಿಲಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಬೆಂದ, ಕಪ್ಪು ಮೈಬಣ್ಣದ, ಶ್ಯಾಮಲವರ್ಣದ, ಕಪ್ಪು ಬಣ್ಣದ

Examples of swarthy in a sentence

  • They don't like pictures of swarthy Jesi with Leventine noses, though.
  • With his swarthy complexion and jet black, straight hair, Louis was actually quite dashing.
  • The door itself, wrought of a swarthy bronze all overgreened by time, stood slightly ajar.

All 17 example sentences with swarthy

Synonyms of swarthy

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of swarthy

Forms of swarthy

Adjective
comparativeswarthier
superlativeswarthiest
Noun
pluralswarthies

Origin of swarthy

Alteration of obsolete swarty, from swart + -y, from Old English sweart (“black”).

Words formed from swarthy

Questions about swarthy

What does swarthy mean?
Swarthy means tawny, dusky, dark.
What is swarthy in Tamil?
Swarthy in Tamil is கருநிறத் தோல் கொண்ட. See Swarthy meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is swarthy?
Swarthy can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce swarthy?
Swarthy is pronounced /ˈswɔɹði/ (US).

Words near swarthy in the dictionary

  1. Swarthmore
  2. swarthness
  3. Swarthout
  4. Swarthouts
  5. swarths
  6. swarthy
  7. swartiness
  8. swarting
  9. swartish
  10. Swartkrans
  11. Swartkranz

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: swarthy (page history and authors); swarthy (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); swarthy (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); swarthy (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); swarthy (Kannada Wiktionary) (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-swarthy.wav.

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