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nightly

adjectiveadverbnounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈnaɪtli//

Happening or appearing in the night; night-time; nocturnal.

adjective

  1. 1

    Happening or appearing in the night; night-time; nocturnal.

    nightly dews

    A cobweb spread above a blossom Is sufficient to protect It from nightly chill.

  2. 2

    Performing, occurring, or taking place every night.

    The dog demanded to go out for his nightly walk.

  3. 3

    Used in the night.

Etymology

From Middle English nyȝtly, nihtlich, nihtlic, from Old English nihtlīċ, nihtelīċ (“nocturnal, nightly, of the night, at night”), equivalent to night + -ly. Cognate with Scots nichtlie (“nightly”), West Frisian nachtlik (“nightly, nocturnal”), Dutch nachtelijk (“nightly, nocturnal”), German nächtlich (“nocturnal, nightly”), Danish natlig (“nightly”), Swedish nattlig (“nightly, nocturnal”).

adverb

  1. 1

    Every night.

    He checks his email nightly.

    It was the Nightingale, and not the Larke, / That pier'st the fearefull hollow of thine eare, / Nightly she sings on yond Pomgranet tree,

    This tunnel assumed some measure of importance during the second world war, when it was used nightly as an air raid shelter for multiple unit electric trains which were propelled over the branch by a steam engine.

    I practice nightly, I try to keep ahead / This art of surfacing is all but dead

Etymology

From Middle English nyghtly, neghtly, from Old English *nihtlīċe (“nightly”), equivalent to night + -ly.

noun

  1. 1

    A build of a software program with the latest changes, released every night.

    Depending on how brave you are, you can even set it to update to the “bleeding edge nightlies” instead of just the point release nightlies if you want to really see the cutting edge of WordPress core development.

Forms

plural
nightlies
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).