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midnight

nounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom/[ˈmɪd̚naɪt]/
  • United Kingdom/[ˈmɪd̚(ˌ)nɑjt]/
  • United Kingdom/[ˈmɪ̞d̚nʌjt]/
  • United States/[ˈmɪd̚ˌnɐɪt]/
  • //ˈmɪd(ˌ)naɪt//

The middle of the night: the sixth temporal hour, equidistant between sunset and sunrise.

noun

  1. 1

    The middle of the night: the sixth temporal hour, equidistant between sunset and sunrise.

    Thanks to its sonar, the narwhal can remain active even at midnight, unhindered by the darkness.

    And vpon the first day of the weeke, when the disciples came together to breake bread, Paul preached vnto them, ready to depart on the morrow, and continued his speach vntill midnight.

  2. 2

    Twelve o'clock at night exactly.

    She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good! / She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood! / They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years, / Till, now, on the stroke of midnight, / Cold, on the stroke of midnight, / The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

    The police report said that officers, who told CNN they are not currently pursuing criminal charges, arrived to the scene just after midnight and found Gillum and a second person, Aldo Mejias, in the hotel room.

  3. 3

    Synonym of boxcars (“a pair of sixes”).

Etymology

From Middle English midnight, from Old English midniht, from Proto-Germanic *midjanahts (“midnight”), equivalent to mid- + night. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Midnoacht (“midnight”), Old High German mittinaht (“midnight”), Danish midnat (“midnight”), Swedish midnatt (“midnight”), Icelandic miðnætti (“midnight”). Compare also Saterland Frisian Middernoacht (“midnight”), Dutch middernacht (“midnight”), German Mitternacht (“midnight”).

adjective

  1. 1

    Utterly dark or black.

    Free and falling, his midnight hair flowed out all around us like a silk canopy.

Forms

plural
midnights
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).