[f. SOMBRE a. + -NESS.] The state of being somber; gloominess; gloom; dullness.
1847. in Webster.
1866. Times, 13 June, 9/4. Her Majesty … was attired in the very deepest mourning—mourning so deep, indeed, that not even a speck of white relieved its sombreness.
1866. Geo. Eliot, F. Holt (1868), 53. The general air of sombreness and privation.
1887. G. Hitchcock, in Scribner’s Mag., II. 167/1. The sombreness of the bordering houses.
1910. M. J. Moses, Lit. South, xii. 290. Intense somberness heightened by intense romanticism,—that is Poe; somberness and romanticism given moral balance by Puritanism,—that is Hawthorne; there, it seems, the similarity ends.
