Word.ws English Dictionary

noctilucine

noctilucine noun: a nitrogenous substance in fireflies, glowworms and marine animals, once believed to be responsible for their luminescence.

Noun

noctilucine (uncountable)

  1. A nitrogenous substance in fireflies, glowworms and marine animals, once believed to be responsible for their luminescence.

Forms of noctilucine

alternative formnoctilucin

Origin of noctilucine

From Latin noctilūca (“firefly”) + -ine. Term coined by British scientist Thomas Lamb Phipson (1833–1908). It appeared first in his article On noctilucine, the phosphorescent principle of luminous animals, published in The chemical new, vol. 32, no. 832, on November 5, 1875.

Questions about noctilucine

What does noctilucine mean?
Noctilucine means a nitrogenous substance in fireflies, glowworms and marine animals, once believed to be responsible for their luminescence.
What part of speech is noctilucine?
Noctilucine is a noun.

Words near noctilucine in the dictionary

  1. noctilucence
  2. noctilucent
  3. noctilucent cloud
  4. noctilucent clouds
  5. noctilucin
  6. noctilucine
  7. noctilucoid
  8. noctilucous
  9. noctiluminous
  10. noctious
  11. noctiphobia

Source and license

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