Word.ws English Dictionary

nocturnals

nocturnals is the plural of nocturnal.

Meaning of nocturnal

Noun

nocturnal (plural nocturnals)

  1. A person or creature that is active at night.
  2. (historical) A device for telling the time at night, rather like a sundial but read according to the stars.
    • A rather different instrument was the nocturnal: it enabled you to tell the time at night, provided you knew the date, from the position of the stars in the constellation of the Great Bear, which rotate around the Pole Star.2015, David Wootton, The Invention of Science, Penguin, published 2016, page 188
    Synonyms:
    star clock

See all 4 meanings of nocturnal

Questions about nocturnals

What is nocturnals the plural of?
Nocturnals is the plural of nocturnal.

Words near nocturnals in the dictionary

  1. nocturnalities
  2. nocturnality
  3. nocturnall
  4. nocturnally
  5. nocturnalness
  6. nocturnals
  7. nocturne
  8. nocturnelike
  9. nocturnes
  10. nocturnin
  11. nocturnist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nocturnals (page history and authors); nocturnal (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: “nocturnals.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nocturnals. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.