• IPA: /ɡlum/

gloom (uncountable)

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.

   • A sullen gloom and furious disorder prevailed by fits.

4. A drying oven used in gunpowder manufacture.

• gloam

• French: obscurité
• German: Düsternis, Dunkelheit
• Italian: oscurità, tenebre, buio
• Portuguese: trevas
• Russian: тьма
• Spanish: penumbra

• French: morosité, noirceur, (dated) sombreur
• German: Trübnis
• Portuguese: trevas
• Russian: уны́ние

• German: Schwermut, Melancholie, Niedergeschlagenheit
• Spanish: melancolía

gloom (glooms, present participle glooming; past and past participle gloomed)

1. (intransitive) To be dark or gloomy.

   • 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.

   • 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.
   • 1855, Alfred Tennyson, “The Letters”, in Maud, and Other Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], OCLC 1013215631 ↗, page 115 ↗:

     A black yew gloom'd the stagnant air.

4. (transitive) To fill with gloom; to make sad, dismal, or sullen.
   • ?, Alfred Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien

     Such a mood as that which lately gloomed your fancy.

   • What sorrows gloomed that parting day.

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