Nights

How to spell nights

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nights

What does nights mean?

1. nounMore than one period of darkness between sunset and sunrise; evenings or overnight periods.

Nights in a sentence

• The hotel charges more on weekend nights than on weekdays.

• He works long nights at the warehouse and sleeps during the day.

Where does nights come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word night descends from Old English 'niht', the dark hours between sunset and sunrise, and it traces back through the Proto-Germanic 'nahts' to an even older Indo-European root that also gave Latin 'nox' and Greek 'nux', both meaning night. The plural simply adds the regular -s ending, but the spelling preserves the silent 'gh' that once represented a throaty consonant sound pronounced in early English and still heard in related German 'Nacht'. That sound faded over the centuries, leaving the 'gh' as a fossil that no longer matches the pronunciation. English speakers have used the word since before the year 1000, making it one of the oldest words in the language. Crucially, 'nights' is a homophone of 'knights', the medieval warriors, whose silent 'k' is a separate spelling trap entirely.

How the word is built

• night (from Old English niht: the dark part of the day)
• -s (plural)