nocturnal

1. (of animals) active at night

2. (of plants) having flowers that open at night and close by day

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Nocturnal

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

Nocturnal means of or belonging to the night. In classical astrology, particular planets were classified as nocturnal or diurnal, no matter where they were in a horoscope. In contemporary astrology, planets are nocturnal if they are located below the horizon (in houses one through six). Many astrologers believe that planets above the horizon line show their influence more in the public sphere whereas planets below the horizon are more private, but this distinction clearly breaks down when considering planets in such locations as the twelfth house (a largely private house situated above the horizon). The expression nocturnal arc refers to the distance, expressed in degrees and minutes of a circle, that a planet traverses between its setting in the west and its rising in the east. Classical astrology also classified signs as diurnal (the masculine signs) and nocturnal (the feminine signs). Contemporary astrologers no longer use the expression nocturnal sign.

Sources:

Bach, Eleanor. Astrology from A to Z: An Illustrated Source Book. New York: Philosophical Library, 1990.

Brau, Jean-Louis, Helen Weaver, and Allan Edmands. Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology. New York: New American Library, 1980.

nocturnal

[näk′tərn·əl]

(biology)

Active during the nighttime.

(science and technology)

Occurring during the nighttime.

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References in periodicals archive

As Thomas Keith notes, Williams set the play in "the two hours between midnight and two A.M.," a decision that "helps to remove the 'normalcy' of a drawing room comedy and heighten the humor." (56) Keith's observation hints at a tussle between meanings of "comedy." Humor is indeed "heightened" by the play's nocturnality, but it is heightened at the expense of generic convention, which demands that the very sun awaken to bless the unions of the young.

Tennessee Williams's "Serious Comedy": problems of genre and sexuality in (and after) Period of Adjustment

Low cost of locomotion in the banded gecko: a test of the nocturnality hiypothesis.

Notas sobre la ecologia de Phyllodactylus reissi (P hyllodactylidae: Sauria) en el Parque Nacional Cerros de Amotape (Tumbes, Peru)

Chiropteran nocturnality. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 67:187-201.

Escape behavior of northern long-eared bats (Myotis septentrionalis) following diurnal disturbance

Most of the pelagic species (families Clupeidae, Engraulidae, Carangidae) were most commonly collected during the day, regardless of where they reside in the trophic web, whereas most of the demersal species tend towards nocturnality (families Tetraodontidae, Sciaenidae, Ariidae).

Diel variation in fish assemblages in tidal creeks in southern Brazil/Variacao diuturna nas assembleias de peixes dos rios de mare do sul do Brasil

Fahrenbach's paper analyzes Bigfoot's foot length, ball width, heel width, height, weight, gait, pace length, speed, chest dimensions, weight extrapolation, caloric consumption, brain size, strength, foot anatomy, growth and life cycles, nocturnality and hair color, among other things, concluding that the data is "indicative of a sizeable population of a species that has adapted in a variety of ways to the demands of surviving in the montane environment of the North American continent."

Shadowing Bigfoot

The final chapter of this book is entitled "Encountering the Other Night," and it deals largely with the "obscurity or nocturnality" (145) of the il y a.

Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas

Evolution of nocturnality in bats: Potential competitors and predators during their early history.

Distributional limits of bats in Alaska