Word.ws English Dictionary

nightcore

nightcore noun: a plunderphonic style of music based on taking an original track and speeding it up, increasing its pitch. Usually associated with visuals of anime-style artwork.

Noun

nightcore (uncountable)

  1. A plunderphonic style of music based on taking an original track and speeding it up, increasing its pitch. Usually associated with visuals of anime-style artwork.
    • Mofo's [motherfucker's] tagging nearly everything Nightcore : it's not Nightcore! Maybe if you knew about hardcore you'd know that in the first place. <_<2009 May 2, @StatusMessage, Twitter, archived from the original on 08 Jul 2023
    • It's all in the title. Anyone know of good original Nightcore songs? Original being the key word here. And I guess any other really good Nightcore song too.2011 December 1, Zephyranth [username], “Any original Nightcore songs?”, in Narkive [originally posted on Yahoo! Answers], archived from the original on 21 Jun 2023

Origin of nightcore

From night + core (“key part of a thing”) via Nightcore, the name of the Norwegian duo that created the genre. They explained their name by saying "we are the core of the night, so you'll dance all night long." Around 2008, others started making their own songs in the same style and used the term nightcore not to refer music made by the duo, but to the new genre of music as a whole. As this usage spread and knowledge of the original duo faded, the term was reanalyzed as night + -core in the same style as other music genres like metalcore, rapcore, etc.

Words formed from nightcore

Questions about nightcore

What does nightcore mean?
Nightcore means a plunderphonic style of music based on taking an original track and speeding it up, increasing its pitch. Usually associated with visuals of anime-style artwork.
What part of speech is nightcore?
Nightcore is a noun.

Words near nightcore in the dictionary

  1. nightclubbers
  2. nightclubbing
  3. nightclubby
  4. nightclublike
  5. nightclubs
  6. nightcore
  7. nightcrawler
  8. nightcrawlers
  9. nightdream
  10. nightdreaming
  11. nightdreams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nightcore (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: “nightcore.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nightcore. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.