Nocturnal

How to spell nocturnal

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nocturnal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nocturnal mean?

1. adjectiveActive or occurring during the night rather than the day.

Nocturnal in a sentence

• Owls are nocturnal hunters that sleep through the daylight hours.

• The noisy neighbours kept up a nocturnal routine that disturbed the whole street.

Where does nocturnal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin nocturnus, meaning 'belonging to the night', which was built on nox (genitive noctis), the ordinary Latin word for 'night'. Late Latin extended it into nocturnalis, and English borrowed the form during the early 1400s, first in the sense of things happening or active in the night. The same nox root lies behind a surprising family of relatives: the musical 'nocturne', the chemical 'equinox' (where day and night are equal), and even the poetic word 'noctilucent'. The spelling trap sits in the middle, since the unstressed vowels of noc-TUR-nal blur in speech and tempt writers to misplace letters. Remembering the Latin noct, meaning night, anchors that opening consonant cluster and the single c.

How the word is built

• noct- (from nox, noctis: night)
• -urn- (forming an adjective of time)
• -al (adjective suffix)