swart
see also: Swart
Pronunciation
  • (British) IPA: /swɔː(ɹ)t/
  • (America) IPA: /swɔɹt/
Adjective

swart (comparative swarter, superlative swartest)

  1. Of a dark hue; moderately black; swarthy; tawny.
    • 1400s: Thomas Occleve, Hymns to the Virgin
      Men schalle then sone se / Att mydday hytt shalle swarte be
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 2
      A nation strange, with visage swart
    • c. 1596, William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Iohn”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358 ↗, [Act III, scene i]:
      Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious,
    • 1819, John Keats, Otho the Great, Act II, Scene I, verses 91-92
      I'll choose a gaoler, whose swart monstrous face
      Shall be a hell to look upon […]
    • 1836, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Old Ticonderoga
      The merry soldiers footing it with the swart savage maids
    • 1925 Ezra Pound, "Canto I"
      […] unpierced ever
      With glitter of sun rays
      Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
      Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
  2. (UK dialectal) Black.
  3. (obsolete) Gloomy; malignant.
    • 1905, Samuel Major Gardenhire, The Silence of Mrs. Harrold - Page 277:
      The keeping eunuchs were at back, solemn in stately rows, bespeared and bescimitared, the Danish, Irish, and German of their countenances lost in the daub which made them swart.
    • 1906, Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods
      Suddenly the swart figure of Time stood up before the gods, with both hands dripping with blood and a red sword dangling idly from his fingers, and said: “Sardathrion is gone! I have overthrown it!”
Noun

swart (plural swarts)

  1. (UK dialectal) Black or dark dyestuff; something of a certain swart; something of a certain ocker.
Related terms Verb

swart (swarts, present participle swarting; past and past participle swarted)

  1. (transitive) To make swart or tawny; blacken; tan.
    to swart a living part
    • 1646, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica
      […] the heate of the Sun, whose fervor may swarte a living part, and even black a dead or dissolving flesh,
Noun

swart (uncountable)

  1. Obsolete spelling of sward#English|sward
    • 1587: Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
      Howbeit where the rocks and quarrie grounds are, I take the swart of the earth to be so thin, that no tree of anie greatnesse, other than shrubs and bushes, is able to grow or prosper long therein for want of sufficient moisture wherewith to feed them with fresh humour, or at the leastwise of mould […]

Swart
Proper noun
  1. Surname



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