Noirs

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A genre characterized by crime narratives often featuring antiheroes and moral ambiguity
2. A style marked by dark, atmospheric elements and complex plots typically involving deception and betrayal
3. A term describing a category of film and literature emphasizing cynicism and fatalism in storytelling

Etymology: "Noirs" is simply the plural of "noir," used for dark crime fiction, and it is a clipped form of "film noir." That French phrase, meaning "black film," was applied to a style of dark, cynical American crime movies, and English speakers trimmed it to the single word that now stands for the genre itself. The adjective "noir" comes straight from French, where it means "black," and it is closely related to the English word "negro," a doublet that entered English by a separate route from the same Latin root, "niger," meaning black. The two words took different paths into the language, so one arrived as a foreign borrowing for a film style while the other became a term with a much more painful history. The plural form follows ordinary English practice: once "noir" became a countable noun for individual works or sub-genres of dark crime fiction, writers could speak of several "noirs" in the way they speak of several thrillers or mysteries.

Synonyms: crime films, detective stories, thrillers