RichThesaurus
black as Newgate's knocker
vs
nigrescent
black as Newgate's knocker
adj
Completely black in colour.
nigrescent
adj
Approaching blackness; blackish, dark-coloured.
How often have the words
black as Newgate's knocker
and
nigrescent
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)