noun
definition
Darkness; the absence of light.
definition
The state of being unknown; a thing that is unknown.
definition
The quality of being difficult to understand; a thing that is difficult to understand.
Examples of obscurity in a Sentence
At last, worn out by age, he accepted an amnesty and returned to the city of Mexico, where he died in obscurity on the 10th of June 1876.
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice.
There is no obscurity about William's first position.
It is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, pursuing in uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorbing task to which he had given up his whole life.
He was amnestied with other exiles in 1874, and died in obscurity in 1876.
One can imagine what confusion and obscurity would result from such an account of the duel.
Asconius Pedianus and Thrasea Paetus were natives of the town; and Quintilian speaks of the directness and simplicity of their diction as Patavinitas, comparing it with the artificial obscurity of the writers of Rome itself.
At times attempts were made to suppress the sect of the Vaudois, but the nature of the country which they inhabited, their obscurity and their isolation made the difficulties of their suppression greater than the advantages to be gained from it.
The origin and early history of the office are veiled in obscurity.
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
If the dauphin did escape, it seems probable that he perished shortly afterwards or lived in a safe obscurity.
The brilliant researches of Frankland on the organo-metallic compounds, and his consequent doctrine of saturation capacity or valency of elements and radicals, relieved Kolbe's views of all obscurity.
His career is involved in considerable obscurity.
Intelligible as this development of Kantian idealism seems in the light of subsequent philosophy, the first statement of it in Hegel was not free from obscurity.
The story of the many attempts made in the interval by " forward " or advanced Puritans to secure vital religious fellowship within the queen's Church, and of the few cases in which these shaded off into practical Separatism, is still wrapped in some obscurity.
Thomas More even found it advisable to withdraw from public life into obscurity.
Fresh pilgrim resorts now began to spring up, and medieval shrines, which had fallen on evil days, to emerge from their obscurity.
The brotherhood appears to have languished in obscurity during the republic, and to have been revived by Augustus.
His parents belonged to the yeoman class, and there is some obscurity about Fox's early career.
Unfortunately the events of his age are shrouded in obscurity, but one can recognize the return of exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem and its environs - now half-Edomite - and various internal rivalries which culminate in the Samaritan schism.'
To fill the peshwa's place to some extent at the head of the Mahratta confederacy, the lineal descendant of Sivaji was brought forth from obscurity, and placed upon the throne of Satara.
The latter part of his life is involved in total obscurity.
This resolution or analysis into simple, because clear and distinct, elements may be brought to a standstill again and again by obscurity and indistinctness, but patient and repeated revision of all that is included in the problem should bring the analytic process to fruition.
For the last eight years of his life after this sudden leap out of obscurity we have a faithful record of Sterne's feelings and movements in letters to various persons, published in 1 775 by his sole child and daughter, Lydia Sterne de Medalle, and in the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1766-1767), also published in 1775.
His efforts, however, proved vain, and he died in comparative obscurity in Paris on the 3rd of November 1611.4 Perez's earliest publication was a small quarto, dedicated to the earl of Essex, written and apparently printed in England about 1594, entitled Pedazos de historia, and professedly published at Leon.
At all periods, moreover, hieroglyphic writing was a branch of decorative art, and it may have been that the ancient Egyptian, like the modern Turk, resented too much lucidity, and liked his literary compositions to be veiled in a certain obscurity.
The origin of the Bombay invasion is shrouded in obscurity.
Its origin is shrouded in obscurity.
The latter obscurity results either from coalescence, to which all joints and segments are liable, or from subdivision, which occasionally affects joints even in the trunk-legs.
In philosophy, properly so called, the humanistic scorn for medieval dullness and obscurity swept away theological metaphysics as valueless.
In 1676 he died in obscurity in Albania.
The decline of Egypt under the XXth Dynasty, and the contemporary fall of the Aegean sea-power, left Cyprus isolated and defenceless, and the Early Iron Age which succeeds is a period of obscurity and relapse.
If he was the individual who died in 1703 at the Bastille, the obscurity which gathered round the nameless masked prisoner is almost incomprehensible, for there was no real secret about Mattioli's incarceration.
If, we may imagine him saying, the precepts of religion are entirely analogous in their partial obscurity and apparent difficulty to the ordinary course of nature disclosed to us by experience, then it is credible that these precepts are true; not only can no objections be drawn against them from experience, but the balance of probability is in their favour.
A further important consideration for the allies was the obscurity of the ethnographi.c lines in central Macedonia.
They are always written in the author's highest style, a style perfectly eloquent and unaffected; they can only be interpreted (on the free-thinking hypothesis) as allegorical with the greatest difficulty and obscurity, and it is pretty certain that no one reading the book without a thesis to prove would dream of taking them in a non-natural sense.
But, even granting that a certain obscurity still hangs undispelled over the problem of the old Avesta, with its twenty-one nasks, we may well believe the Parsees themselves, when they affirm that their sacred literature has passed through successive stages of decay, the last of which is represented by the present Avesta.
Nicholas was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and died in obscurity at Avignon; while the Roman people submitted to King Robert, who governed the church through his vicars.
The early history of the family is involved in obscurity, but they are first heard of as lords of Farneto or Farnese, a castle near the lake of Bolsena, and they played an important part as consuls and signori of Orvieto.
Considerable obscurity exists as to their other functions, but they seem to have been charged with providing food for the visitors to the temples, with the care of certain offerings, and with the arrangement of the sacrificial banquets.
As he himself wrote, "the most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation; like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the places of more important bodies."
Without effort, and even without intention probably, it looked beyond first consequences to the farther or the final outcome; and to complete the operation, the faculty which detected the remoter consequences did not allow them to remain in obscurity, but brought them out as actualities no less than the first and perhaps far more important than the first.
Bonaparte was resolved not to sink into obscurity, and the directors were anxious to keep him as far as possible from Paris; they therefore sanctioned the expedition to Egypt which deprived the Republic of its best army and most renowned captain.
Nor is that obscurity to any appreciable degree illuminated by the tendency also noticeable in idealist writers to find the true possession of freedom only in a self emancipated from the influence of irrational passion, and liberated by knowledge from the dominion of chance or the despotism of unknown natural forces.
They range from the rough and noble pathos of Egil, the mystic obscurity of Kormak, the pride and grief of Hallfred, and the marvellous fluency of Sighvat, to the florid intricacy of Einar and Markus.
Galileo Galilei, Kepler's most eminent contemporary, took a foremost part in dissipating the obscurity that still hung over the very foundations of mechanical science.
It is probable that St Patrick established Armagh as a metropolitan see, but the history of the primacy, which during a long period can only have been a shadow, is involved in obscurity.
The origin of the Bushman is lost in obscurity, but he may be conceived as the original inhabitant of the southern portion of the continent.
The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Gaul is veiled in obscurity, though philologists, anthropologists and archaeologists are using the glimmer of traditions collected by ancient historians to shed a faint twilight upon that remote C past.
Avempace's principles, it is clear, lead directly to the Averroistic doctrine of the unity of intellect, but the obscurity and incompleteness of the Regime do not permit us to judge how far he anticipated the later thinker.