Dark Ages

• dark ages

“Period of European history” from Latin saeculum obscūrum (“dark age; dark century”), first used by Italian scholar Petrarch (1304-1374).

Dark Ages

1. (proscribed) The period of European history encompassing (roughly) 476–1000 CE.

   Synonym: Early Middle Ages

2. (Ancient Greece) Greek Dark Ages (c. 1100 BC - 750 BCE)
3. Dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450 - 1863)
4. Dark ages of Laos (c. 1707 - 1893)
5. (astronomy) Dark Ages, 380 thousand to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
6. (figuratively) Any relatively primitive period of time.
   • 2000 Mar 6, Network World, Vol. 17, No. 10, page 49:

     Yes, DSL is a better, faster and less expensive way to access the Internet. Unfortunately, it's saddled with back-office systems that belong in the Dark Ages and politics that may require regulatory oversight.

   • 2001, Lawrence Lessig, The future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world‎, →ISBN, page 104:

     Put yourself back in the dark ages, the time before the Internet took off–say, the 1970s–and ask: What was the environment for creativity then?

The usage of Dark Ages to refer to the period from roughly 476-1000 is now mostly proscribed by historians as a misnomer, as the term was created during the Enlightenment referring to lack of historical records at the time, and technological/scholarly progress did not drop as is commonly thought by laymen. A more correct term in contemporary usage is the Early Middle Ages.

• Dark Ages on Wikipedia.Wikipedia