afterglow

Noun

afterglow (countable and uncountable, plural afterglows)

1. The glow seen in the sky after sunset.
   • That the sunset in Egypt is gorgeous, every body knows; but I, for one, was not aware that there is a renewal of beauty, some time after the sun has departed and left all grey. […] everything begins to brighten again in twenty minutes;—the hills are again purple or golden,—the sands orange,—the...1848, Harriet Martineau, chapter 2, in Eastern Life, Present and Past, volume 1, London: Edward Moxon, pages 17–18
   • Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.1916, Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, New York: Macmillan, verse 273, p. 77

   Synonyms:

   afterlight

2. The light emitted by an incandescent object while cooling.
   • Nothing will matter to you more than that [base]ball. It will hold you so completely that when you at last file out and return to the normal world, it will stay with you like the afterglow of a flashbulb that’s gone off in your eyes.1984, Paul Auster (as Paul Benjamin), Squeeze Play, London: Faber & Faber, 1991, Chapter 19, p. 176
3. The light emitted by a phosphor after excitation.
4. The mildly euphoric feeling experienced after a pleasurable experience, especially after an orgasm or drug-induced high.
   • […] he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our...1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter 16, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book (please...
   • She herself had grown old as people should grow old—steadily and firmly. No interruptions, no belated after-glows and spasmodic returns.1922, Elizabeth von Arnim, chapter 16, in The Enchanted April, New York: Washington Square Press, published 1995, page 216
5. An afterparty.
   • There's an afterglow with singing after the evening worship.

   Synonyms:

   afterparty