night
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "night", 5-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "night" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "night" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
night is aEnglishnoun. It means: The time when the Sun is below the horizon when the sky is dark. Pronounced /naɪt/. It ranks #221 in English word frequency. Often confused with NIH and nit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | night |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /naɪt/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #221 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 15 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for night is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /naɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #221 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for night, with forms such as "inght", "ngiht", and "nigght". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 15 confusable-pair relationships, "NIH", "nit", "NIST", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English nighte, night, nyght, niȝt, naht, from Old English niht, from Proto-West Germanic *naht (“night”), from Proto-Germanic *nahts (“night”), from Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts (“night”). Cognates Cognate with Scots nicht (“night”), Yola neeght… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is night, spelled N-I-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The time when the Sun is below the horizon when the sky is dark.
- 2The period of darkness beginning at the end of evening astronomical twilight when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, and ending at the beginning of morning astronomical twilight.
- 3A period of time often defined in the legal system as beginning 30 minutes after sunset, and ending 30 minutes before sunrise.
- 4An evening or night spent at a particular activity.
- 5A day, or at least a night.
- 6Nightfall.
- 7Darkness (due to it being nighttime).
- 8A dark blue colour, midnight blue.
- 9A night's worth of competitions, generally one game.
Etymology
From Middle English nighte, night, nyght, niȝt, naht, from Old English niht, from Proto-West Germanic *naht (“night”), from Proto-Germanic *nahts (“night”), from Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts (“night”). Cognates Cognate with Scots nicht (“night”), Yola neeght, nieght, nyeght (“night”), North Frisian naacht, Nacht, noach, nåcht (“night”), Saterland Frisian Noacht (“night”), West Frisian nacht (“night”), Cimbrian, Dutch nacht (“night”), German, Low German Nacht (“night”), Luxembourgish Nuecht (“night”), Mòcheno nòcht (“night”), Vilamovian naocht (“night”), Yiddish נאַכט (nakht, “night”), Danish nat (“night”), Faroese nátt (“night”), Icelandic nátt, nótt (“night”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish natt (“night”), Scanian nøtt (“night”), Gothic 𐌽𐌰𐌷𐍄𐍃 (nahts, “night”); also Breton noz (“night”), Cornish and Welsh nos (“night”), Irish anocht (“tonight”), Manx noght (“tonight”), Scottish Gaelic a-nochd, an nochd (“tonight”), Latin nox (“night”) (whence English nox, a doublet), Greek νύχτα (nýchta, “night”), Albanian natë (“night”), Latgalian and Latvian nakts (“night”), Lithuanian naktis (“night”), Belarusian ноч (noč, “night”), Bulgarian нощ (nošt, “night”), Czech, Polish, and Slovak noc (“night”), Macedonian ноќ (noḱ, “night”), Russian ночь (nočʹ, “night”), Serbo-Croatian ноћ, noć (“night”), Slovene noč (“night”), Ukrainian ніч (nič, “night”), Tocharian A nakcu (“last night; at night”), Tocharian B nekcīye (“last night; at night”), Hittite 𒉈𒆪𒊻 (nekuz, “evening, nightfall; dawn, twilight”), Sanskrit नक्त् (nákt).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: inght,ngiht,nigght,nighht,nightt,nigth,nihgt,nnight
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for night
Misspelling Variants of "night"
Frequency rank: #221 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter N in our English index: