twilit

1. 1
   adjective

   Lit by twilight, or by a dim glow that resembles it; left only half-lit.

   She painted the twilit harbor in muted grays and faint rose tones.

   The cave's twilit entrance gave way to total darkness within a few steps.

   Similartwilighted

   Oppositesunlit, bright

   Note

   Half-light as atmosphere rather than time of day. Robert Louis Stevenson in 1887 sets it beside a formless preexistence, a dim state before life begins. Kurt Vonnegut in 1959 uses it for a tunnel of shuttered booths, dusk with no evening in it. It does not take more or most. Twilighted and twilitten are alternative forms of the same adjective.

2. 2
   verbliterary

   Simple past and past participle of twilight. Rare and literary; twilit is far more common as an adjective.

   Note

   A poetic verb's past form, built the way light gives lit. One spelling serves both uses: "dusk twilit the hills" and "the hills had been twilit." The underlying verb means to light something faintly and takes an object, so the participle sits most naturally in the passive. There it shades into the half-lit adjective.

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