Night

How to spell night

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce night

What does night mean?

1. nounThe period of darkness between sunset and sunrise, when it is dark outside.

Night in a sentence

• The city looks beautiful at night with all the lights on.

• She works the late shift and sleeps during the day, never seeing much daylight, only the quiet of night.

Where does night come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English niht (also spelled neaht), meaning the period of darkness between sunset and sunrise. It traces back through the Germanic family, with close relatives in the German Nacht and the Dutch nacht, and ultimately to an ancient root shared across Indo-European languages, which also surfaces in the Latin nox and the Greek nux. The puzzling 'gh' in the modern spelling once represented a real throaty consonant sound, much like the 'ch' in the Scottish 'loch', which English speakers gradually stopped pronouncing. Scribes kept the letters even after the sound vanished, which is exactly why 'night' looks so much harder than it sounds. That same silent 'gh' shows up in its homophone 'knight', a completely separate word for a mounted warrior, so the two are easily muddled in writing.

How the word is built

• night (from Old English niht: the dark part of a day); the silent 'gh' preserves an old guttural sound now lost

Words that sound like night

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• knight: A man given honourable military rank in the Middle Ages, or a person awarded a title such as Sir for service to the crown.