darken someone's door

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Idioms and Phrases

Come unwanted to someone's home, as in I told him to get out and never darken my door again . The verb darken here refers to casting one's shadow across the threshold , a word that occasionally was substituted for door . As an imperative, the expression is associated with Victorian melodrama, where someone (usually a young woman or man) is thrown out of the parental home for some misdeed, but it is actually much older. Benjamin Franklin used it in The Busybody (1729): “I am afraid she would resent it so as never to darken my doors again.”

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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