noctivagant

From Late Latin noctivagans, from noctivagare, from Latin nocti- (“night”) + participle form of vagari (“to wander”).

• (UK) IPA^(key): /nɒkˈtɪvəɡənt/

noctivagant (comparative more noctivagant, superlative most noctivagant)

1. Walking or wandering in the nighttime, nightwandering. [from 17th c.]
   • 1823, James Hogg, The Three Perils of Woman; Or, Love, Leasing and Jealousy: A Series of Domestic Scottish Tales, E. Duyckinck (1823), p. 145:

     "'[…] I therefore think, Sarah, that the incommensurability of the crime with the effect, completely warrants the supersaliency of this noctivagant delinquent.'"

   • 1967, Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English & American Authors, Johnson Reprint Corporation (1967), p. 195:

     "Over the city, the suburb, the slum / He rambled from pillar to post, / And backward and forward, observant, though dumb, / As a fleetly noctivagant ghost."

   • 1982, TC Boyle, Water Music, Penguin, published 2006, page 363:

     Unhappily, we lost the big fellow, Smirke, to noctivagant predators some days back [...].

   • 2003, Alan Wall, The School of Night, St. Martin's Press (2003), p. 223–224:

     "Not merely nocturnal but noctivagant, a nightwalker, a prowler, a nomad of the midnight streets, attempting to abolish the distinction between the light that comes from outside and the sort that shines within."

• For quotations using this term, see Citations:noctivagant.

• mundivagant
• solivagant

• "noctivagant" in A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Both with Regard to Sound and Meaning, Thomas Sheridan, 1790.