"black letter day" meaning in English

See black letter day in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: black letter days [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun|head=black letter day}} black letter day (plural black letter days)
  1. A day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day. Synonyms: black-letter day
    Sense id: en-black_letter_day-en-noun-feQ6TAo6 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for black letter day meaning in English (1.7kB)

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "black letter days",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "head": "black letter day"
      },
      "expansion": "black letter day (plural black letter days)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "Coordinate term: red letter day"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1877 December 3, George Eliot, “Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones”, in J. W. Cross, editor, George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, volume III, published 1885, page 233",
          "text": "So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves, only on simple black-letter days when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1893, Thomas De Quincey, “Conversation and Coleridge”, in Alexander H. Japp, editor, The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, volume II, London: William Heinemann",
          "text": "But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day."
      ],
      "id": "en-black_letter_day-en-noun-feQ6TAo6",
      "links": [
        [
          "black letter",
          "black letter"
        ],
        [
          "red letter day",
          "red letter day"
        ],
        [
          "inauspicious",
          "inauspicious"
        ]
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "black-letter day"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "black letter day"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "black letter days",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "head": "black letter day"
      },
      "expansion": "black letter day (plural black letter days)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "Coordinate term: red letter day"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1877 December 3, George Eliot, “Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones”, in J. W. Cross, editor, George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, volume III, published 1885, page 233",
          "text": "So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves, only on simple black-letter days when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1893, Thomas De Quincey, “Conversation and Coleridge”, in Alexander H. Japp, editor, The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, volume II, London: William Heinemann",
          "text": "But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A day marked in ancient calendars in black letter, as distinguished from the more import red letter days; an inauspicious day."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "black letter",
          "black letter"
        ],
        [
          "red letter day",
          "red letter day"
        ],
        [
          "inauspicious",
          "inauspicious"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "black-letter day"
    }
  ],
  "word": "black letter day"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.