Display omitted •Tetrahedral chalcogenides considered as the derivatives of cubic or hexagonal ZnS.•Tetrahedral chalcogenides are potential NLO, photocatalytic, and PV materials.•Hitherto no review for tetrahedral chalcogenides with light-related applications.•Structures and light-related applications of tetrahedral chalcogenides discussed.•Several future directions about tetrahedral chalcogenides analyzed. There are a large number of metal chalcogenides crystallized in the wurtzite or zinc blende-derived structures, in which all of the anions or cations are fourfold-surrounded by their neighboring counter ions. These compounds can be defined as tetrahedral chalcogenides. According to valence electrons’ configuration obeying valence electron rules or not, they can be classified into two types, normal or defect tetrahedral chalcogenides. There is a closely structural relationship between them. As all the atoms have the tetrahedral-coordination styles, structure disorders of occupancies or sites can be easily happened to them. So, there are also many alloys or solid-solutions members belonging to tetrahedral chalcogenides. In view of their special structure features, rich chemical compositions, and tunable optical band gaps, they are ones of the most promising second-order nonlinear optical (NLO), photocatalytic, photovoltaic (PV), and thermoelectric candidate materials. In fact, most of these chalcogenides can be applied in more than one of the aforementioned fields. To date, there are several review works on part of these chalcogenides, including typical I-III-VI2, I2-II-IV-VI4, and diamond-like chalcogenides. However, hitherto there is not a systematical summary about chalcogenides with tetrahedral structures. Intrigued by their flourishing developments, it is very necessary to summarize them, focusing on their structural chemistry and versatile applications. To compact this review, only several application fields related with utilization of lights are discussed, including second-order NLO, photocatalytic, and PV applications.