noons

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of noon.

   The poet wrote of golden noons spent idle beneath the olive trees.

   Travelers came to dread the blazing noons of the desert crossing.

   Note

   The plural follows the countable uses of noon: a run of middays, as in blazing desert noons, or the figurative high points of something. It also serves the Arabic letter ن, so a word can contain two noons. Older texts may hide a different hour. Noon once named midnight, and earlier still it named the ninth hour after sunrise, around three in the afternoon.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of noon.

   Note

   The verb behind this form is intransitive: someone noons, but nobody noons something. Instead it takes a phrase of place, as in noons at the oasis or noons under the oak, and it means resting or sleeping through the middle of the day. It is spelled like the habitual adverb and the plural noun. A subject in front and a place phrase after usually mark it as the verb.

3. 3
   adverb

   On a regular basis around midday, day after day at the noon hour.

   Night-shift workers tend to sleep noons and rise as the sun sets.

   During harvest, the crew rests noons before returning to the fields.

   Note

   An adverb of habit: it means 'at noon, as a rule,' never 'more than one noon.' The -s comes from the adverbial suffix, not the plural one. It cannot be compared, and it often heads a clause like a label. Edgar Cayce on Healing Foods (2002) lays out a diet as "Noons— … Evenings— …." Because it is spelled exactly like the plural noun, the sentence must show which one you are reading.

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