gloom

From Middle English *gloom, *glom, from Old English glōm (“gloaming, twilight, darkness”), from Proto-Germanic *glōmaz (“gleam, shimmer, sheen”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰley- (“to gleam, shimmer, glow”). Cognate with Scots gloam (“twilight; faint light; dull gleam”), Norwegian glom (“transparent membrane”).

• IPA^(key): /ɡlum/

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• Rhymes: -uːm

gloom (usually uncountable, plural glooms)

1. Darkness, dimness or obscurity.

   the gloom of a forest, or of midnight

   • 1898, J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet Chapter 4

     Here was a surprise, and a sad one for me, for I perceived that I had slept away a day, and that the sun was setting for another night. And yet it mattered little, for night or daytime there was no light to help me in this horrible place; and though my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, I could make out nothing to show me where to work.

2. A melancholic, depressing or despondent atmosphere.
   • 1855, Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, XIX:

     No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; / This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath / For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath / Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

3. Cloudiness or heaviness of mind; melancholy; aspect of sorrow; low spirits; dullness.
   • Burke

     A sullen gloom and furious disorder prevailed by fits.

4. A drying oven used in gunpowder manufacture.

• doom and gloom
• gloomily
• gloomy

• gloam

gloom (third-person singular simple present glooms, present participle glooming, simple past and past participle gloomed)

1. (intransitive) To be dark or gloomy.
   • Goldsmith

     The black gibbet glooms beside the way.

   • 1891, Mary Noailles Murfree, In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska 2005, p. 189:

     Around all the dark forest gloomed.

2. (intransitive) to look or feel sad, sullen or despondent.
   • 1882, W. Marshall, Strange Chapman, volume 2, page 170:

     Her face gathers, furrows, glooms; arching eyebrows wrinkle into horizontals, and a tinge of bitterness unsmooths the cheek and robs the lip of sweetened grace. She is evidently perturbed.

   • D. H. Lawrence

     Ciss was a big, dark-complexioned, pug-faced young woman who seemed to be glooming about something.

3. (transitive) To render gloomy or dark; to obscure; to darken.
   • Walpole

     A bow window […] gloomed with limes.

   • Tennyson

     A black yew gloomed the stagnant air.

4. (transitive) To fill with gloom; to make sad, dismal, or sullen.
   • Tennyson

     Such a mood as that which lately gloomed your fancy.

   • Goldsmith

     What sorrows gloomed that parting day.

5. To shine or appear obscurely or imperfectly; to glimmer.

• For quotations of use of this term, see Citations:gloom.