BLACKOUTとは 意味・読み方・使い方

動詞

black out (third-person singular simple present blacks out, present participle blacking out, simple past and past participle blacked out)

1. (transitive, idiomatic) To censor or cover up by writing over with black ink.
   • 2006, Calton Lewis, Wake Island: The Story of a Civilian Pow at Niigata, Japan 1941-1945

     Seigel was able to send two post cards home in 44 months via the Red Cross. The first one was completely blacked out by the Japanese censor's pen. The second one he sent, Seigel wrote that he weighed his "usual weight of 130". Seigel's usual weight was 230 so the family could see that he had been severely starved while in captivity. Seigel had at least triumphed over the Japanese censor and his black pen.

2. (transitive, figuratively) To censor or cover up.
   • 1979, Chris de Burgh, “The Devil's Eye”, in Crusader:

     I have blacked out your television, every station in the world is mine.

   • 2022 October 27, Simon Parkin, “README.txt by Chelsea Manning review – secrets and spies”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     At times, README.txt is vague; some sections have been blacked out, presumably on legal advice.

3. (intransitive) To lose consciousness; to suffer a blackout.

   Antonyms: black in, come to

   • 1944 June 3, Charles A. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, published 1970, page 839:

     I am blacking out—ease the stick forward slightly—the sky is clear again—I turn out over water—reverse turn—there are antiaircraft on the island below—I reverse again—and again.

   • 1956, Andre Norton, Plague Ship:

     And they were not surprised when Tang Ya reeled into the mess, his face livid and drawn with pain. Rip and Dane got him to his cabin before he blacked out. But all they could learn from him during the interval before he lost consciousness was that his head was bursting and he couldn't stand it. Over his limp body they stared at one another bleakly.

4. (transitive) To cause (someone) to lose consciousness.
5. (transitive) To obscure in darkness.
   • 1924, Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game:

     Bleak darkness was blacking out the sea and jungle when Rainsford sighted the lights. He came upon them as he turned a crook in the coast line; and his first thought was that be had come upon a village, for there were many lights.

   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 14, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:

     Nanny Broome was looking up at the outer wall.  Just under the ceiling there were three lunette windows, heavily barred and blacked out in the normal way by centuries of grime.

   • 1943 May 10, “Press Serial Story: Girl In A Blackout”, in Pittsburgh Press:

     The Venetian blinds and the drapes, she thought, would completely black out the room from the ocean side.

6. (intransitive) To be in a state of blackout, as a building, a city, a ship.

   The countryside blacked out to avoid helping enemy aircraft.

同意語

• (lose consciousness): faint, pass out
• (make dark): darken

派生語

派生した語

• → Norwegian Bokmål: blække ut (slang)

参考

名詞

black-out (plural black-outs)

1. Alternative spelling of blackout.

語源

Deverbal from black out.

発音

• (米国発音) IPA: /ˈblæk.aʊt/
• (Canadian raising) IPA: /ˈblæk.ʌʊt/

名詞

blackout (countable and uncountable, plural blackouts)

1. A temporary loss of consciousness.

   Synonyms: blankout, faint, syncope

   Coordinate terms: grayout, greyout

2. A temporary loss of memory.

   Synonym: blankout

   • 2010 October 28, Charlie Day & Rob McElhenney, “Who Got Dee Pregnant?” (2:13 from the start), in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia‎, season 6, episode 7:

     “I mean, what is she even talking about? Got her pregnant at the Halloween party? What does that mean? I don't even remember that party. I was wasted.” “Yeah, me too. I browned out that evening.” “"browned out"? What's "browned out"?” “Oh, it's when you drink so much that everything goes brown. It's not as severe as a blackout, 'cause I remember bits and pieces. I like to call it "browning out."”

3. A large-scale power failure, and resulting loss of electricity to consumers.

   Synonyms: power cut, outage

   Coordinate terms: brownout, dimout

   • 2006 May 13, Weekend Argus, page 5:

     The repairs at the Koeberg Power Station in the Western Cape were on schedule for completion in the third week of May. This follows huge blackouts related to the problems at the power supplier since November.

   • 2023 November 15, Prof. Jim Wild, “This train was delayed because of bad weather in space”, in RAIL, number 996, page 30:

     There have been several examples of space weather affecting power grids in the last few decades, notably blackouts caused by GICs [geomagnetically induced currents] in Canada in 1989 and Sweden in 2003.

4. An instance of censorship, especially a temporary one.

   media blackout

   • 1983 December 17, “Defending The Right To Choose”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 22, page 2:

     According to a press release issued by the clinic staff, a blackout by the local press had kept the public uninformed about the clinic's harassment.

   • 2026 January 13, Deepa Parent, William Christou, “Hundreds of gunshot eye injuries found in one Iranian hospital amid brutal crackdown on protests”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     The protests have alarmed authorities, and on Thursday night, they shut off internet and mobile access in the country, cutting the Iranian people off from the rest of the world. Rights groups have accused the government of exploiting the media blackout to carry out a brutal crackdown against protesters.

5. (Internet) An intentional outage of a website or other online service, typically as a form of protest.

   the 2012 English Wikipedia blackout

   • 2023 June 14, Sara Morrison, “The ongoing Reddit Blackout, explained”, in Vox‎:

     A group of Redditors, many of whom are moderators, organized a temporary boycott, with participating subreddits going private or restricted for 48 hours starting on Monday. A Twitch stream tracking the blackout claimed that nearly 8,500 subreddits, some with tens of millions of subscribers, had gone dark by Tuesday afternoon.

6. (historical) The mandatory blocking of all light emanating from buildings, as well as outdoor and street lighting as a measure against aerial bombing or naval attack, as imposed during, e.g., World War II.
   • 1939 November, Charles E. Lee, “Railways and the War — I”, in Railway Magazine, page 317:

     In co-operation with the Government departments, the British railway companies prepared their stations, offices, docks, hotels, trains, and other premises for the necessary blackout of lighting that it was realised would be required in a state of emergency, and in the case of the experimental voluntary blackouts which took place in July and August the railway companies concerned co-operated in every way possible.

   • 1971, Gwen White, Antique Toys And Their Background, page 88:

     During the "blackout", many real cars and lorries had their front wings painted white, in order to avoid accidents.

7. (attributive) The blocking out of as much light as possible.

   blackout blinds; blackout curtains

8. (slang, criminology, rare) A mass murder committed, usually in an urban area, to eliminate potential witnesses of a previous crime.

派生語

派生した語

• → Dutch: black-out
• → French: blackout
• → German: Blackout
• → Hebrew: בלקאאוט
• → Portuguese: blecaute, blackout

参考

動詞

blackout (third-person singular simple present blackouts, present participle blackouting, simple past and past participle blackouted)

1. (nonstandard) Alternative form of black out.
   • 1941, Annual Report of the Boy Scouts of America: Letter from the Chief Scout Executive Transmitting the Annual Report of the Boy Scouts of America ... as Required by Federal Charter, Boy Scouts of America, page 37:

     Scouts assisted Mabel Smythe Building officials in blackouting windows.

   • 2013, Dr Pauline Fairclough, Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., →ISBN:

     As blades in night's chest buried, Voraciously my eyes strike, the silent Warsaw evening, my city blackouted throughout...

   • 2015, Helen Brown, Reflections: Australian Stories from My Father's Past, →ISBN:

     We had some inconvenience, such as food and petrol rationing, blackouting of homes and work places.

   • 2018, Peter Sikora, The Polish 'Few': Polish Airmen in the Battle of Britain, Casemate Publishers, →ISBN:

     'After recovering I 'blackouted' so much that I did not wake up until 10,000 ft below.' Zumbach's account, apart from the detailed description of his dogfight, also highlights the subject of the Polish pilots communicating in the air ...

   • 2021, Jitendra Dixit, Bombay 3, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:

     Sarla started weeping and rushed to pull Jagan up. Jagan had banged his head into a wall and blackouted for a few moments. As his vision returned, he saw all his writings that he had lovingly been collecting […]

Further reading

• blackout on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “blackout”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “blackout”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “blackout”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “blackout”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.