Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state of being sunless; shade.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or characteristic of being without the sun or sunshine.
  • noun figuratively Dreariness, joylessness.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • This is one of the BBC's good old-fashioned dramas of flat caps and bicycles, cobbles and postal orders, as young James turns up in Scotland's capital of sunlessness with his cardboard suitcase and optimist's grin.

    Phil Hogan's Christmas TV highlights 2011

  • The general belief seems to be that, in the end, it was the cold, damp, bleak sunlessness of Jura that did him in.

    In Search of Orwell's Scottish Retreat 1994

  • A tendegree axial tilt, together with the orbit, means that the northern part of the Arctican continent spends half its year in unbroken sunlessness.

    The Queen of Air and Darkness Anderson, Poul, 1926-2001 1973

  • Dutch people themselves, because of its sunlessness during the winter months; though as a matter of fact the climate is not so very different from that in the greater part of England.

    Dutch Life in Town and Country P. M. Hough

  • Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink.

    Humoresque A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It Fannie Hurst 1928

  • I should have liked to have looked down from the sun into the sunlessness, as the old Fate woman at Ronco can do when she sits in winter at her window; or again, I should like to see how things would look from this same window on a leaden morning in midwinter after snow has fallen heavily and the sky is murky and much darker than the earth.

    Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino 1881

  • My father often told her afterwards to what an incalculable degree her presence brightened the old house and the two forlorn gentlemen; it would have been utter darkness if she had left them again to their old hazy sunlessness; so my father took the desperate step of leading her to the thorn walk.

    Girlhood and Womanhood The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes Sarah Tytler 1870

  • To be fixed at the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the complacent-talking man: this appeared to her too extreme a probation for two or three weeks.

    The Egoist George Meredith 1868

  • To be fixed at the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the complacent-talking man: this appeared to her too extreme a probation for two or three weeks.

    Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith George Meredith 1868

  • But I should have liked to have looked down from the sun into the sunlessness, as the old Fate woman at Ronco can do when she sits in winter at her window; or again, I should like to see how things would look from this same window on a leaden morning in midwinter after snow has fallen heavily and the sky is murky and much darker than the earth.

    Selections from Previous Works and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals Samuel Butler 1868

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