Word.ws English Dictionary

blue o'clock

blue o'clock noun: very early in the morning; just before dawn.

Noun

blue o'clock (uncountable)

  1. (colloquial) Very early in the morning; just before dawn.
    • We had a midnight lunch too after all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the morning after the night before.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 10: Wandering Rocks]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page 225
    • All of us girls, Marjorie Tombey, Marion, Alyse and I in our chassis, dipping in the swanny at blue o'clock.1947, Robert Briffault, New Life of Mr Martin, page 121

Questions about blue o'clock

What does blue o'clock mean?
Blue o'clock means very early in the morning; just before dawn.
What part of speech is blue o'clock?
Blue o'clock is a noun.

Words near blue o'clock in the dictionary

  1. blue nose
  2. blue note
  3. blue notes
  4. blue notice
  5. blue notices
  6. blue o'clock
  7. blue oak
  8. blue oaks
  9. blue ointment
  10. blue ointments
  11. blue olive berry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue o'clock (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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