black – English noun declension

English noun forms of black

Noun: black
Singularblack
Pluralblacks

Sample Sentences

  • Black is the badge of hell, / The hue of dungeons, and the suit of night. [c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Loues Labour’s Lost”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene iii]:]
  • CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. This four component color system is standard for most types of color printing, since black is an ink color in printing but is simply the absence of color in video. [2009, Harry Henderson, Computer Science and Technology, Revised edition, →ISBN, page 93:]
  • Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. [1625, Francis Bacon, “Of Death”, in Essays:]
  • "How! They surely cannot pretend that the black is an Englishman?" "There are all kinds of Englishmen, black and white, when seamen grow scarce. […]" [1863, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter XXIV, in Miles Wallingford:]
  • But presently the negro seized the Hindoo by the throat; the Hindoo just pricked him in the arm with his knife, and the next moment his own head was driven against the side of the cabin with a stunning crack[…]The cabin was now full, and Sharpe was for putting both the blacks in irons. [1863, Charles Reade, Hard Cash:]
  • Numa was about to charge—there was little time in which to compare various methods or weigh the probable results of any. And then a number of things happened, almost simultaneously—the lion sprang from his ambush toward the retreating black—Tarzan cried out in warning—and the black turned just in time to see Numa halted in mid-flight by a slender strand of grass rope, the noosed end of which had fallen cleanly about his neck. [1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 123:]
  • Prize-winning books continue a trend toward increased representation of blacks, accounting for most of the books with exclusively black characters. [2004, Anthony Joseph Paul Cortese, Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, page 108:]
  • black don't crack
  • Pernod and black; snakebite and black; cider and black
  • At this point black makes a disastrous move.
  • 1...Qd3 2 Ne1 Nd2! wins since 3 Nxd3 Rxf1 mate while 3 Qxc7+ Kg6 only delays the end. The best White can do is 3 Qc3+ Qxc3 4 Rxc3 Rxe1 when Black also wins the Bf1 and will be two pieces up. [2023 January 13, Leonard Barden, “Chess: Carlsen takes on young guns at Wijk as world champion eyes record”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 23 Jan 2023:]
  • the black or sight of the eye [1644, Kenelme [i.e., Kenelm] Digby, Two Treatises. In the One of which, the Nature of Bodies; in the Other, the Nature of Mans Soule; is Looked into: In Way of Discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules, Paris: […] Gilles Blaizot, →OCLC:]
  • defiling her white lawn of chastity with ugly blacks of lust [1619, William Rowley, All's Lost by Lust:]
  • He pulled on the black, the tip of the filter hot and malleable between his lips, and felt a cool tingling coat the simmer in his chest and begin to eat away at it in small bites. [2008, Jesmyn Ward, Where the Line Bleeds, Bloomsbury (2018), page 48:]
  • The black is always the safest place for a firefighter. [2024, Karl Brauneis, The Blackwater Fire and the Men Who Fought It:]
  • The black is a safe zone for retreating firefighters. It is an area already burned out by a fire without the raw or dead fuels needed for a fire to feed on. [2013, Jaylynn Wylie, Fireline:]

Etymology

1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Germanic *blakaz
3. Proto-West Germanic *blak
4. Old English blæc
5. Middle English blak
6. English black
7. From Middle English blak, black, blake, from Old English blæc (“black, dark", also "ink”), from Proto-West Germanic *blak, from Proto-Germanic *blakaz (“burnt”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleg- (“to burn, shine”).
8. See also Dutch blaken (“to burn”), Low German blak, black (“blackness, black paint, (black) ink”), Old High German blah (“black”); also compare Latin flagrāre (“to burn”), Ancient Greek φλόξ (phlóx, “flame”), Sanskrit भर्ग (bharga, “radiance”).
9. Adjective sense 20 is a semantic loan from Cantonese 黑面 (hak1 min6, “to pull a long face, to scowl”). See: Middle English Nouns 'blak', Old English Nouns 'blæc', Ancient Greek Nouns 'φλόξ'.

Verbs referencing "black"

French Nouns black, Icelandic Nouns blökkumaður.