Dunkelziffer

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word Dunkelziffer. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word Dunkelziffer, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say Dunkelziffer in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word Dunkelziffer you have here. The definition of the word Dunkelziffer will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofDunkelziffer, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

German

Etymology

dunkel (“uncertain”, literally “dark”) +‎ Ziffer (“figure”, literally “digit”). Colported first in criminology in 1908 by the PhD thesis Unverbesserliche Verbrecher und ihre Behandlung p. 28 of Shigema Oba, a Japanese jurist moving 1905 to Germany for studying Western law, on the model of alleged statistician English ***dark-number which according to current corpora seems either entirely made up as such or merely heard in some lecture (but rather false memory since he neither hyphenated it in a likely manner nor translated it correctly, were it to have existed).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈdʊŋkəlˌt͡sɪfɐ/
  • Audio:(file)
  • Hyphenation: Dun‧kel‧zif‧fer

Noun

Dunkelziffer f (genitive Dunkelziffer, plural Dunkelziffern)

  1. (informal, journalistic) dark figure (estimated number of unreported cases)
    Synonym: (uncommon) Dunkelzahl
    • 2020 June 20, Andreas Bernard, “Jenseits der Dunkelziffer”, in Die Zeit‎:
      Abgesehen von den politischen Instrumentierungen wird die Dunkelziffer aber gerade in einer Welt als zunehmend inakzeptabler Makel empfunden, die durch digitale Technologien und "Big-Data"-Speicher der Utopie einer restlosen Datenerfassung nachhängt.
      (please add an English translation of this quotation)
    • 2022 May 23, Natalie Mayroth, “Extreme Hitze in Indien und Pakistan: Gelebte Klimakrise”, in Die Tageszeitung: taz‎, →ISSN:
      Auch so aber sind schon fast 100 Tote gemeldet worden, eine hohe Dunkelziffer ist wahrscheinlich.
      (please add an English translation of this quotation)

Usage notes

Used more generally than dark figure, which specifically refers to unreported cases of crime. Dunkelfeld (“dark field”) is now the preferred term in criminology to describe a range of uncertainty.

Declension

Declension of Dunkelziffer
singular plural
indef. def. noun def. noun
nominative eine die Dunkelziffer die Dunkelziffern
genitive einer der Dunkelziffer der Dunkelziffern
dative einer der Dunkelziffer den Dunkelziffern
accusative eine die Dunkelziffer die Dunkelziffern

See also

Further reading

Wikious
Boobota
Sagapedia