black hole

noun

1

: a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star

2

: something resembling a black hole: such as

a

: something that consumes a resource continually

a financial black hole

b

: an empty space : void

… the archives of the past few years are a black hole.

—David Herman

c

: a dark and seemingly inescapable state or situation

the black hole of depression

Synonyms of black hole

• emptiness
• vacancy
• void
• blank

Examples of black hole in a Sentence

discovered that there was a black hole in the library's collection with regard to her topic

Recent Examples on the Web

Stars form from collapsing gas clouds, and only much later, when the biggest stars exhaust their fuel, black holes appear. —Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 3 Jan. 2026

Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes. —Michelle Goldberg, Mercury News, 30 Dec. 2025

More massive black holes have been claimed, but the authors of the new research pointed out that those other black holes had their masses measured indirectly, so their masses are just guesses. —Keith Cooper, Space.com, 28 Dec. 2025

That day, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries not involving black holes, cosmology, or strange new subatomic particles, but about AI. —Adam Frank, The Atlantic, 15 Dec. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1963, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for black hole

• bankroll
• bedroll
• borehole
• cajole
• catchpole
• charcoal
• condole
• control
• dipole
• downhole
• enroll
• extol

Kids Definition

black hole

noun

: an invisible region believed to exist in space having a very strong gravitational field and thought to be caused by the collapse of a star