Word of the Day:
gloaming
What It Means
Twilight, as at early morning (dawn) or (especially) early evening; dusk.
Gloaming in Context
“You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming[…]”
Did You Know?
From Middle English gloming, from Old English glōmung, from Old English glōm (“twilight”). Related to glow. The OED notes: "The vowel of the modern gloaming is anomalous, as Old English glōmung should normally become glooming. The explanation is probably that the ō was shortened in the compound ǣfen-glommung (as the spelling seems to show was actually the case), and that from this compound there was evolved a new subject glŏmung, which by normal phonetic development became Middle English glǭming, modern English gloaming."
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gloaming (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “gloaming.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gloaming. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.