Dunkelziffer

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)

(informal, journalistic) dark figure (estimated number of unreported cases)
Synonym: (uncommon) Dunkelzahl
- 2020 June 20, Andreas Bernard, “Jenseits der Dunkelziffer”, in Die Zeit‎^[1]:
  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^[2], →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 [feminine]

	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