Meanings
- rareuncountablecommunicationsThe state of being nightful.First known use late 19th c.
He feels such delightfulness, stay out all-nightfulness, may I get tightfulness, / Which none can explain.
1894 April 29, chapter XIX, in A New England Woman, The Socrates Publishing Company, page 1333 more examples
They had thought themselves / in Hawaii when suddenly the pines, / trembling with nightfulness, / shook them out of their sibyllance.
1967 [1957], Frank O'Hara, “Romanze, or The Musical Students”, in Meditations in an Emergency, 2nd edition, Grove Press, page 20“And as this nightfulness appears to thin with distance, it should be entirely possible to pinpoint its epicenter? I find myself very much inclined to agree, Picnic. […]”
2016 September 29, Sarah Porter, Vassa in the Night, Tom Doherty Associates, page 163Tonight the crescent moon is on its back / facing the darkness and I know that feeling / of nightfulness and the half ring it leaves / like part of a cupmark on a walnut table […]
2017, Julia McCarthy, “A Stab in the Dark”, in All the Names Between, Brick Books, page 5
Origin
Cite this entry
nightfulness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nightfulness
“nightfulness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nightfulness. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “nightfulness,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nightfulness.
Source: nightfulness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.