Noctambulation

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The condition of wandering on foot during the hours of darkness; the act of engaging in nighttime walking, often in a semi-conscious state; the occurrence of strolling while asleep, specifically at night under the cover of darkness
2. The act of moving on foot during nighttime, typically while in a sleepwalking state
3. Walking around at night often without full awareness, as part of a somnambulist episode

Etymology: Sleepwalking has a surprisingly tidy Latin pedigree. "Noctambulation" is built from "nox" (genitive "noctis"), Latin for "night", and "ambulatio", a walking or strolling, which itself comes from "ambulare", to walk. The result is a term that literally means "night-walking," assembled from classical parts to name an activity that people had always done without a neat label of their own. The word is first recorded in English in 1721, and it reached English alongside a French equivalent, "noctambulation," which shows the same construction. Its arrival in print reflects the eighteenth-century habit of borrowing and building scientific and learned vocabulary from Latin and Greek, so that the name for a nocturnal wanderer sounds more formal than the everyday "sleepwalking" that followed it.