Obscure

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Pronunciation: /əbˈskjʊə(ɹ)/

Definitions

1. Not widely known or difficult to understand; hidden from view or unclear in meaning
2. Not clearly perceived or easily comprehended due to being concealed, vague, or lacking prominence
3. Difficult to discern or grasp because of dimness, ambiguity, or relative lack of fame or visibility

Etymology: The Latin "obscurus" was built from "ob-", meaning "over" or "in the way of", and a root that gave us words for darkness. Its literal sense was "dark" or "dusky", so something obscure was once something you could barely see, as with a shadowed room or a dim sky. The sense of being hard to understand came later, when that visual dimness was carried over to ideas and writing. The word reached English through Middle English from Old French "obscur", which had itself taken the Latin form directly. It is a doublet of "oscuro", the Italian word for "dark", meaning English and Italian inherited the same Latin ancestor by separate routes, though the English word is the one that drifted furthest from its literal sense of darkness.

Synonyms: unclear, unknown, hidden, ambiguous, cryptic

Antonyms: clear, obvious, known, evident, apparent