Word Story
The word means 'with little light' — not pitch darkness, but the half-lit condition where shapes register and details don't. Its second sense is mental rather than visual: a person can be only partly aware of a problem, or half-remember a face, and the word captures that unsharp knowledge without implying anyone is slow. That figurative use is where it earns its keep in memoir and journalism, whenever a writer wants to admit that a memory has blurred at the edges and no firmer claim is available. In everyday life it turns up mostly in descriptions of rooms and restaurants, where the phrase about being lit that way signals either intimacy or seediness depending on the surrounding sentence. It has become such a fixture of film noir and detective fiction that readers now expect shadows the moment they meet it, even in scenes that happen at noon.