Nightly

How to spell nightly

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nightly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nightly mean?

1. adverbEach night; on every successive evening.
2. adjectiveHappening or recurring every night, or relating to the night.

Nightly in a sentence

• adverb

  The security guard patrols the warehouse nightly.

• adjective

  The hotel offers a nightly turndown service in every room.

• adverb

  The pharmacy advises taking one tablet nightly before bed.

• adjective

  His nightly routine includes reading for half an hour.

Where does nightly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English, combining niht, the Anglo-Saxon word for the dark hours between sunset and sunrise, with the suffix -lice, which gave both adjectives and adverbs in early English. The element niht itself goes back to a common Germanic root shared with Dutch nacht and German Nacht, and ultimately to an ancient Indo-European word for night that also lies behind Latin nox and Greek nux. The suffix -lice softened over the centuries into the modern -ly, which is why so many English words for manner and frequency end that way. The sense has stayed remarkably stable: from the earliest records it meant either 'happening each night' or 'belonging to the night'. The main spelling trap is that nightly sounds exactly like its unrelated cousin knightly, the adjective for knights, whose silent k betrays a different Old English ancestor entirely (cniht, meaning a young servant or warrior).

How the word is built

• night (the period of darkness)
• -ly (adjective/adverb suffix: each, in the manner of)