Niht

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic spelling of night, meaning the dark period between sunset and sunrise when the sky is unlit
2. Old spelling of the word for the hours of darkness between evening and morning, when the sun is below the horizon
3. Obsolete form of the term for the time of darkness from dusk until dawn, used in older English writing

Etymology: Old English "niht" is the direct ancestor of modern "night," and it was already a common noun in the earliest written English. Its root reaches back to an Indo-European base shared with Latin "nox," the source of "nocturnal," and Greek "nyx." "Nocturnal" and "night" are distant cousins, separated when the Latin and Germanic branches parted thousands of years ago. The clearest trace of the older form is "tonight." Old English speakers wrote "tō niht," literally "to night," meaning on this night, and the phrase was later fused into one word. The spelling "gh" in "night" also records a lost sound. It once stood for a throat-scraping consonant, like the "ch" in Scottish "loch," which disappeared from most dialects. Scots kept the older form "nicht," so that sound survives in Scotland's spelling.