Skip to content
Allin

vigil

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈvɪd͡ʒəl//

An instance of keeping awake during normal sleeping hours, especially to keep watch or pray.

noun

  1. 1

    An instance of keeping awake during normal sleeping hours, especially to keep watch or pray.

    I saw her head drooped upon her hand; her whole attitude expressing that profound depression, whose lonely vigil wastes the midnight in a gloomy watch, which yet hopes for nothing at its close.

    Eventually the body trade grew so reckless that relatives took to holding graveside vigils, lest their loved ones disappear in the night.

    A vigil was held for Ms. Cheptegei on Wednesday night, Ms. Indimuli said, with many women praying that she would survive.

    Mortenson, who asked to use a pseudonym for this story, says she has been attending rallies and vigils in her home state to regain her optimism, but she’s finding it tough.

  2. 2

    A period of observation or surveillance at any hour.

    His dog kept vigil outside the hospital for eight days while he was recovering from an accident.

  3. 3

    The eve of a religious festival in which staying awake is part of the ritual devotions.

  4. 4

    A quiet demonstration in support of a cause.

    The protesters kept vigil outside the conference centre in which the party congress was being held.

Etymology

From Middle English vigile (“a devotional watching”), from Old French vigile, from Latin vigilia (“wakefulness, watch”), from vigil (“awake”), from Proto-Indo-European *weǵ- (“to be strong, lively, awake”). Doublet of Wigilia. See also wake and vigor, from the same root.

verb

  1. 1

    To participate in a vigil.

    As the arrested painters and their supporters waited out their "day in court," other activists distributed Hiroshima information leaflets, vigiled silently with placards and banners, and marched 500-strong through downtown Boston to a rally at City Hall Plaza.

Forms

plural
vigils
past tense
vigiled, vigilled
past participle
vigiled, vigilled
present participle
vigiling, vigilling
third person singular
vigils
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).