midnight

Pluralmidnights (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Twelve o'clock at night exactly, marking the division between one day and the next.

   The train departs at midnight, so passengers should arrive early.

   She finished writing her report just after midnight.

   Oppositenoon, midday

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The middle of the night, the sixth temporal hour, falling halfway between sunset and sunrise.

   The monks rose at midnight to pray, the night only half spent.

   Deep in the desert, midnight brought the coldest air of the long night.

   Oppositenoon, midday

   Note

   The word was built for this meaning. Old English midniht is simply mid- plus night, with cognates across Germanic such as Danish midnat and Swedish midnatt. Reckoned this way, midnight is the point where the night is half spent, so it shifts as sunset and sunrise shift. Paul preaches "vntill midnight" in the King James Bible of 1611. Noon and midday are its opposites, and the clock-time meaning pins it to twelve.

3. 3
   adjectiveliterary

   Utterly dark or black, without any trace of light.

   As black as a moonless sky far from any city lights.

   The raven's midnight feathers gleamed faintly in the candlelight.

   Beneath the midnight surface of the sea, nothing stirred.

   Similarinky, black, jet-black, pitch-black, ebony

   Note

   Here the noun has turned into a color word, set before another noun the way raven or jet is: midnight hair, a midnight sea. It belongs to poetic and descriptive writing rather than everyday speech. It does not grade, because nothing is more midnight than something else; it already names the darkest point. The image comes straight from the middle of the night, when the dark is deepest.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A roll showing two sixes in dice games, also called boxcars.

   She groaned as her opponent rolled midnight for the second time.

   Landing midnight at that moment swung the whole game in his favor.

   Similarboxcars

   Note

   Dice players use it for the throw of six and six. The two faces add up to twelve, the number the clock shows at the stroke of midnight. It is interchangeable with boxcars and behaves the same way, as a bare noun naming the roll: a player rolls midnight or throws it, with no article. Outside dice games the word does not carry this meaning, so it needs a gaming context to be understood.

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