black letter day

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English

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Alternative forms

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Noun

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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.
    Coordinate term: red letter day
    • 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:
      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.
    • 1893, Thomas De Quincey, “Conversation and Coleridge”, in Alexander H. Japp, editor, The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey[1], volume II, London: William Heinemann:
      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.

Further reading

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