black letter day

English

Alternative forms

• black-letter day

Noun

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

• “black-letter day”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.