Word.ws English Dictionary

Gate Night

Gate Night proper noun: a particular night, commonly the night of the 30th to the 31st of October, during which young people play pranks and do mischief in their neighborhoods.

Proper noun

Gate Night (plural Gate Nights)

  1. (around New York City, Connecticut, Winnipeg, Rhode Island) A particular night, commonly the night of the 30th to the 31st of October, during which young people play pranks and do mischief in their neighborhoods.
    Synonyms:
    list in Mischief Night

Synonyms of Gate Night

  • list in Mischief Night

Forms of Gate Night

pluralGate Nights

Origin of Gate Night

So called because the Gates of Hell supposedly opened up the night before Halloween, which would allow demons to wander towns and cause mischief. In some areas, the name refers to the mischief of lifting residential gates off their hinges and either exchanging them with other people's gates, or placing them in awkward places such as suspended in trees.

Questions about Gate Night

What does Gate Night mean?
Gate Night means a particular night, commonly the night of the 30th to the 31st of October, during which young people play pranks and do mischief in their neighborhoods.
What part of speech is Gate Night?
Gate Night is a proper noun.

Words near Gate Night in the dictionary

  1. gate guards
  2. gate house
  3. gate houses
  4. gate lice
  5. gate money
  6. Gate Night
  7. gate of hell
  8. gate of horn
  9. gate of ivory
  10. gate off
  11. gate rape

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Gate Night (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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Cite this entry: “Gate Night.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gate_night. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.