Tonight

How to spell tonight

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tonight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tonight mean?

1. adverbOn the night of the present day; during the coming evening or night.
2. nounThe night or evening of the present day, regarded as a point in time.

Tonight in a sentence

• adverb

  The restaurant is fully booked tonight, so we will go tomorrow instead.

• noun

  Tonight marks the final performance of the touring show.

• adverb

  She plans to finish the report tonight before the morning deadline.

• noun

  Tonight is the only chance we have to see the meteor shower this year.

Where does tonight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew from the Old English phrase to niht, meaning literally 'on the night' or 'at night', where to functioned as a preposition and niht meant the dark hours between dusk and dawn. The two parts were written separately for centuries, much like 'to-morrow' and 'to-day', and only gradually fused into the single solid spelling we use now. The night element traces back to the same ancient Germanic root that gives German Nacht and Dutch nacht, and ultimately to a much older Indo-European word for night shared across Latin nox and Greek nyx. The silent gh in night, once pronounced as a throaty sound, is the main spelling trap; it survives only in writing as a fossil of medieval pronunciation. Because the modern sense is simply 'the present or coming night', the word settled into its current closed form by the nineteenth century.

How the word is built

• to- (on, at, from Old English to)
• night (from Old English niht: the dark hours)