lights

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of light.

   City lights glittered across the bay at midnight.

   The stage lights dimmed as the play began.

   Note

   The plural belongs to the countable senses: lamps, bulbs, fixtures, signals. Light as radiation stays uncountable, so a physicist measures light while a stagehand rigs lights. Traffic signals take the plural too, and by extension so does the junction they control. The same spelling also serves as the verb form and as an old word for an animal's lungs, so context does the sorting.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of light.

   Each morning the caretaker lights the old lamps along the hallway.

   A single match lights the entire bonfire within seconds.

   Note

   One spelling covers both sides of the verb. It is transitive when someone lights a candle or a hallway, and intransitive when damp wood finally lights. Pinball players use it too: a shot that lights the bonus makes that bonus ready to collect. Its past has two shapes, the regular lighted alongside the irregular lit.

3. 3
   nounplural

   The lungs, now chiefly those of an animal, so named because they are lighter than the organs around them.

   The cook simmered the lights and other offal into a rich stew.

   Hunters traditionally fed the lights to their hounds after a kill.

   Similarlungs

   Note

   A word that exists only in the plural. There is no single "light" for one lung, and it always takes plural agreement. Spenser spells it lites in The Faerie Queene (1596) and pairs it with lungs: "his lungs and lites." By the time of Dean King's The Feud (2013), it needs a gloss, "a hog's lights (or lungs)," and it sits among the offal of a slaughtered pig.

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