Novel anthracene-bridged carbazole organic dyes (designated ML4 and ML5) were synthesized using the Suzuki coupling reaction. These dyes were designed to be donor--conjugation-acceptor sensitizers for dye-sensitized solar cells, where the carbazole moiety acts as the donor, the anthracene moiety provides the -conjugation, and the cyano acrylic acid acts as the acceptor. Solar cells were fabricated with ML4 and ML5 alone with low power conversion efficiencies, but they were also used as co-sensitizers with N719, improving the efficiency of the dye-sensitized solar cells produced by similar to 3% and similar to 10%, respectively. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.