Word.ws English Dictionary

nyctophobe

nyctophobe noun: someone who is afraid of the night or darkness.

Noun

nyctophobe (plural nyctophobes)

  1. Someone who is afraid of the night or darkness.
    • Across the hall, Tad Gillespie, a genuine nyctophobe with the nyctophobe's morbid fear of the dark, lay wide awake, eyes peeled, armed with a collection of quartz-halogen flash-lights whose total candlepower could have lighted the Washington Monument.1989, David Michaelis, Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl, New York, N.Y.; […]: Bantam Books, →ISBN, page 173
    • Before returning to the surface, we shut off our lamps and experienced total darkness. A nyctophobe would have gone insane.1992, T. J. Burr, Rocky Mountain Adventure Collection: The Adventures of a Colorado Mountaineer, Santa Barbara, C.A.: Fithian Press, →ISBN, page 188
    Antonyms:
    nyctophile

Examples of nyctophobe in a sentence

  • The Brink has no sympathy for claustrophobes or nyctophobes, people who are afraid of the dark.2009, J. C. Hutchins [pseudonym; Chris Hutchins], Personal Effects, New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Griffin, →ISBN, page 14:
  • She was a borderline nyctophobe; had insisted on sleeping with a night-light on the entire time they'd been married.2010, Bill Pronzini, The Hidden, New York, N.Y.: Walker & Company, →ISBN, page 35:

Antonyms of nyctophobe

Forms of nyctophobe

pluralnyctophobes

Origin of nyctophobe

From nycto- (“night”) + -phobe.

Questions about nyctophobe

What does nyctophobe mean?
Nyctophobe means someone who is afraid of the night or darkness.
How do you use nyctophobe in a sentence?
The Brink has no sympathy for claustrophobes or nyctophobes, people who are afraid of the dark.
What part of speech is nyctophobe?
Nyctophobe is a noun.
What is the plural of nyctophobe?
The plural of nyctophobe is nyctophobes.

Words near nyctophobe in the dictionary

  1. nyctophiles
  2. nyctophilia
  3. nyctophiliac
  4. nyctophiliacs
  5. nyctophilic
  6. nyctophobe
  7. nyctophobes
  8. nyctophobia
  9. nyctophobic
  10. nyctosaurid
  11. nyctosaurids

Source and license

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