A vivid British simile meaning completely, utterly black — as dark as the famous iron knocker on the gate of Newgate Prison, London's most notorious jail. The phrase dates back centuries and trades on Newgate's grim reputation: everything associated with it was dark, forbidding, and heavy. Used to describe anything from overcast skies to scorched toast to a blackened cooking pot, it has the dour wit characteristic of working-class London speech, and still pops up in older British writing and regional dialogue.
He came back from fixing the boiler with his hands and face black as Newgate's knocker, grinning like it was all a great joke.
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(UK, simile) Completely black in colour.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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