dusky (adj.)

"partial darkness, state between light and darkness, twilight," 1620s, from an earlier adjective dusk, from Middle English dosc (c. 1200) "obscure, not bright; tending to darkness, shadowy," having more to do with color than light, which is of uncertain origin, not found in Old English. Middle English also had it as a verb, dusken "to become dark." The Middle English noun was dusknesse "darkness" (late 14c.).

Perhaps it is from a Northumbrian variant of Old English dox "dark-haired, dark from the absence of light," with transposition of -k- and -s-, (compare colloquial ax for ask). But OED notes that "few of our words in -sk are of OE origin." Old English dox is from PIE *dus-ko- "dark-colored" (source also of Swedish duska "be misty," Latin fuscus "dark," Sanskrit dhusarah "dust-colored;" also compare Old English dosan "chestnut-brown," Old Saxon dosan, Old High German tusin "pale yellow").

adjective suffix, "full of or characterized by," from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga- (source also of Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs), from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic).

Originally added to nouns in Old English; it was used from 13c. with verbs, and by 15c. with other adjectives (for example crispy).

Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets keep step with classical feet when the grammatically empty but metrically useful -e dropped off such words in late Middle English. To replace it, by Elizabethan times, verse-writers had adapted to -y forms, and often it was done artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." Simple huge plain would have been a metrical balk.

After Coleridge's criticism of the -y forms as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to get away with it, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest. Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survived, he said, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regarded as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted the shorter forms.